Paul Erlich is Dead, his Environmentalism is (still) refuted

Environmentalist Paul Erlich alarmed the world back in 1968 predicting a "population explosion" which forecast “the greatest cataclysm in the history of man” -- food shortages escalating hunger and starvation “into famines of unbelievable proportions.”

In the obituary for the 93-year-old doom-monger, who died this week, the New York Times called his predictions "premature." But they weren't even wrong. They didn't happen, and they never will. (See above for how cataclysmically wrong the catastrophiser really was.)

Some of his other failed and frankly nasty predictions:

• "In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate."
• "In ten years [this was 1970] all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish."
• "By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people.If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000."
• “Sometime in the next 15 years the end will come, and by ‘the end’ I mean an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.”
• “Giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point would be the moral equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun."
• “By 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth’s population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people.”
• "We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail."

Yet despite being wrong about everything, the failed forecaster made a million and was showered with awards.

He never recanted.

Doom sells. Sadly. Still.

He was a gambler. A few years back, I wrote about a famous bet, for which this is the winning cheque:

Several decades ago, gloom-monger Paul Erlich and techno-optimist Julian Simon had a bet.

Erlich was certain resources were running out and humanity was doomed. Simon asserted they weren't and wouldn't be. The bet was that, by the end of that decade, a basket of resources chosen by Erlich would cost more to buy — more, said Erlich, because by then those resources would be running out. Less, said Simon in reponse. (Simon, you see, was confident that the ultimate resource, from which all others derive, is the human mind — a machine for turning shit into useful stuff.) 

Simon won. 

Resources weren't running out. 

They still aren't.

The "Simon Abundance Index" (SAI, below),which measures the relative abundance of resources since that bet, now stands at 609.4. Meaning that in 2023, the Earth was 509.4 percent more abundant in 2023 than it was in 1980!

How astonishing is that! World population since 1980 has almost doubled; while resources produced by human beings have multiplied by more than five times!! 

Turns out that as global population increases, that "virtually all resources became more abundant. How on earth (literally) is that possible?"

Unlike Erlich and the sundry other doom-sayers who litter the planet today, Simon recognised that without the knowledge of how to use them, raw materials have no economic value whatsoever. They are just so much stuff. What transforms a raw material into a resource is knowledge — knowledge of how that stuff might satisfy a human need, and how to place it in a causal connection to satisfy that need. (The great Carl Menger explained this process way back in 1870!) And since new knowledge is potentially limitless, so too are resources.

 Infinite, because the ultimate resource is the human mind.

In this sense, as George Reisman puts it, environmentalism is refuted.

The Simon Abundance Index: 1980-2023 (1980=100)

Marian Tupy points out some interesting parallels with other catastrophisers:

1. Malthus published his book on English overpopulation and overconsumption in 1798. Thereafter, the population of England rose, and the prices of wheat fell relative to wages.
2. Marx published 'Das Kapital' in 1867, arguing that workers' wages would be squeezed to zero by capitalist competition (based on a much-debated and probably incorrect "Engels' Pause"). Thereafter, English wages skyrocketed.
3. Ehrlich published his book about coming global famines in 1968. Thereafter, global famines collapsed, and standards of living across much of the world rose.

Forget these failed forecasters. Sign up to Tupy's Human Progress agenda instead.

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