Paul Ehrlich's first sentence of his mega-bestseller, The Population Bomb, made him famous. “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”
Ehrlich, who is back in the news with a recent appearance on “60 Minutes” and the subsequent publication of his autobiography, has lived long enough to see his doomsday predictions repeatedly proven wrong.
In 1990, he famously lost his bet with the late economist Julian Simon regarding Ehrlich's related claim that population growth would lead to shortages of natural resources and resulting higher prices for them.
Yet more dramatically, as the world's population has grown from 3.7 billion in 1970 to 8 billion today, the only mass starvation has been in draconian socialist economies like North Korea and mid-1980s Ethiopia. The University of Oxford's Our World in Data reports that worldwide famine deaths sharply fell from an annual average of over 16.6 million in the 1960s to 255,000 since 2010.
The vast reduction in famine deaths, Our World in Data also shows, does not mean more are living in misery. From 1970 through 2015, extreme poverty around the world deeply declined from almost 48 percent to less than 10 percent.
Never troubled by facts, Ehrlich continues to insist that “humanity is not sustainable.” He is not alone. Despite the exposure of Ehrlich's apocalyptic assertions as false – if not fraudulent – many continue to believe the myth of catastrophic population growth. Perhaps the most prominent current adherent of this quasi-religion, indeed, speaks to a vast television audience five nights a week.
In January 2022, Tucker Carlson asserted that the growth of U.S. population from about 200 million in 1969 to about 334 million in 2022 “is massive and incredibly rapid demographic growth, and it's accelerating.” U.S. Census data, however, show that the U.S. population growth rate has been declining for about six decades. From 1950 to 1960, the U.S. population grew by 18.5 percent; from 2010 to 2020, it grew by only 7.4 percent.
Carlson also argued that “Mass population growth makes life worse for pretty much everybody… There are never enough resources to go around.” The facts establish that the opposite is true. A new book by Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley, “Superabundance,” extends and expands on the work of Julian Simon and shows that as population has grown, resources have become vastly more abundant and less expensive, particularly when based on the number of hours of work required to earn enough to purchase them.
Rather than being anchored to facts, Carlson's population growth views are part of his dark side that opposes freedom and prosperity. His population growth views are related to his restrictionist, zero-sum game claims about how immigration impacts jobs and wages that similarly cannot be squared with decades of directly contrary economic data. The same is true of his strident opposition to Walmart and apparent support for industrial policy. And nothing positive can be said about his admission that he wants Russia to win its murderous war against Ukraine.
Perhaps darkest of all, however, Carlson has used his television show to promote several voices of antisemitism: Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene; investigative journalist Lara Logan; Hungary's pro-Putin prime minister, Viktor Orbán and retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor, also Carlson's favorite advisor regarding Russia's aggression against Ukraine. (For descriptions of the antisemitism that each has expressed, see this article and for active links this related article.) And that was all before he featured a lengthy interview with Hitler admirer Ye, aka Kanye West.
Carlson admirably uses his giant platform to defend free speech, oppose demonization of law enforcement and challenge the imposition of the woke race and gender agenda. When he shifts to the dark side, however, his vast audience should stop watching.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
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So you believe people that hold “unpopular opinions” should be banned? That only pushes the voices into the darkness, doesn’t stop them and lets them fester where they can gain strength.