Given a chance, he would have been a greater mass murderer than Mao.
15 thoughts on “Paul Ehrlich”
Motive, Opportunity and Ability. He fell short in the latter two criteria.
Paywalled. Wrong about everything however doesn’t leave much to the imagination…
The best book on this subject is Bob Zubrin’s “The Merchants of Despair”. His thesis was that in every evil ideology which ever existed one can detect an element of Malthusianism.
It seems to me that much of the time the efforts of “environmentalists” result in a worse problem than they tried to “solve”.
I wonder how many people have died as a result.
An example is the EU directive removing lead from solder. The almost pure tin grows whiskers, allegedly one of the causes of irreproduceable reported faults in avionics in airliners. Nice when you have fly by wire. Lots else too.
Good riddance. He will not be missed. May he and all of his works be quickly forgotten.
I guess starting with Glenn Reynolds, people are piling on.
I think of the agronomist Norman Borlaug as the anti-Paul Erlich inasmuch that Borlaug with his “Green Revolution” wheat strains did more than any other person to prove Paul Erlich’s prophesies of doom by famine wrong.
But Norman Borlaug warned us that he “bought us time, maybe a generation” and that the miracle of agricultural plenty he worked couldn’t go on forever.
Could what is going on in the Middle East right now be Paul Erlich’s apocalypse? Iran is a huge country but it has experienced huge population growth. It is arid and its water supplies are at the breaking point, which could explain the recent street demonstrations along with their brutal suppression by its government and its threatened nuclear weapons breakout that provoked a response from the US and Israel?
Paul, your comment gave me a Heinlein mental twitch. See this recent post by Sailer. “Immigration” is his hook, but the source quote is more about resources in general. As many can probably guess, the word immediately following his paywall rhymes with “bore”.
Heinlein’s beliefs changed quite a bit over the years. He was even a lefty for awhile. Malthusian collapse looked pretty inevitable for awhile in the 1950s and 1960s.
But rapid urbanization in the Third World has moderated population growth enormously and has even reversed it in many places. In the first couple of decades after WW2 it was far from obvious things would work out this way. But it sure as hell is obvious now.
Which makes the persistence of Malthusianism on the left just one more thing – albeit a big one – on the near-infinitely-long list of things they get wrong. It’s an attitudinal habit they got into back in the day and their general imperviousness to fresh data has preserved anachronistic fears.
Heh, I read your last sentence and subconsciously substituted “generational” for “general”. Works just as well!
Yes it does. A leftist political persuasion is a mental Tupperware container in which beliefs that have long since spoiled continue a zombie-like existence in the back of one’s mental fridge.
In a word, no.
Iran averages only about 10% more people per square mile than Texas. And its “huge population growth” days are well behind it. It seems that Islamic theocracy is one of the more effective birth control mechanisms extant. Iran’s population is already within spitting distance of its projected maximum and will start contracting sometime before mid-century, plus or minus.
That Iran is poverty-stricken and short of basics is not due to Malthusian progression, but due to totalitarian mismanagement and aggressive misbehavior that has resulted in widespread economic sanctions. An autocracy doesn’t have to be communist in order to screw up a national economy.
The recent street demonstrations occurred because the only thing the average Iranian has had a bellyful of recently is theocratic oppression and shortages due to regime mismanagement and misbehavior. There is, in short, no money at home because what isn’t spent on nuclear weapons development goes to what I like to call the “3-H Club” – Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis – and to Shia militias in Iraq. The regime pursues its dreams of empire and of Israel’s destruction at the considerable expense of its long-suffering citizenry.
When the Israelis and the US have shredded the regime sufficiently from the air, the general populace will emerge and finish the job on the ground. I do not anticipate that process being pretty – probably a bit like what the Taliban did to the Soviet-stooge regime once the Russians dragged themselves home in 1989. The IRGC and Basij dead-enders deserve to die ugly and I think the general population of Iran will cheerfully oblige them in that respect.
Iran just isn’t managed well. They can’t build a helicopter but will build missiles. The nuclear weapons are because they want to kill everyone.
Their proxies controlled, Lebanon, Gaza, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. Once they had nukes, those proxies would have expanded their wars against the other gulf states, the USA, and the rest of the world.
Control the spice control the universe
Some religious people seem to get a hate-on about Charles Darwin, as if he invented Eugenics himself. But I think Paul Ehrlich is a much better candidate for a go-to, stereotypical Evil Scientist than Darwin.
Oh, definitely. Darwin merely described reality – what a scientist is supposed to do. Ehrlich peddled a dystopian fever dream for wealth and worldly fame.
Motive, Opportunity and Ability. He fell short in the latter two criteria.
Paywalled. Wrong about everything however doesn’t leave much to the imagination…
The best book on this subject is Bob Zubrin’s “The Merchants of Despair”. His thesis was that in every evil ideology which ever existed one can detect an element of Malthusianism.
It seems to me that much of the time the efforts of “environmentalists” result in a worse problem than they tried to “solve”.
I wonder how many people have died as a result.
An example is the EU directive removing lead from solder. The almost pure tin grows whiskers, allegedly one of the causes of irreproduceable reported faults in avionics in airliners. Nice when you have fly by wire. Lots else too.
Good riddance. He will not be missed. May he and all of his works be quickly forgotten.
I guess starting with Glenn Reynolds, people are piling on.
I think of the agronomist Norman Borlaug as the anti-Paul Erlich inasmuch that Borlaug with his “Green Revolution” wheat strains did more than any other person to prove Paul Erlich’s prophesies of doom by famine wrong.
But Norman Borlaug warned us that he “bought us time, maybe a generation” and that the miracle of agricultural plenty he worked couldn’t go on forever.
Could what is going on in the Middle East right now be Paul Erlich’s apocalypse? Iran is a huge country but it has experienced huge population growth. It is arid and its water supplies are at the breaking point, which could explain the recent street demonstrations along with their brutal suppression by its government and its threatened nuclear weapons breakout that provoked a response from the US and Israel?
Paul, your comment gave me a Heinlein mental twitch. See this recent post by Sailer. “Immigration” is his hook, but the source quote is more about resources in general. As many can probably guess, the word immediately following his paywall rhymes with “bore”.
Heinlein’s beliefs changed quite a bit over the years. He was even a lefty for awhile. Malthusian collapse looked pretty inevitable for awhile in the 1950s and 1960s.
But rapid urbanization in the Third World has moderated population growth enormously and has even reversed it in many places. In the first couple of decades after WW2 it was far from obvious things would work out this way. But it sure as hell is obvious now.
Which makes the persistence of Malthusianism on the left just one more thing – albeit a big one – on the near-infinitely-long list of things they get wrong. It’s an attitudinal habit they got into back in the day and their general imperviousness to fresh data has preserved anachronistic fears.
Heh, I read your last sentence and subconsciously substituted “generational” for “general”. Works just as well!
Yes it does. A leftist political persuasion is a mental Tupperware container in which beliefs that have long since spoiled continue a zombie-like existence in the back of one’s mental fridge.
In a word, no.
Iran averages only about 10% more people per square mile than Texas. And its “huge population growth” days are well behind it. It seems that Islamic theocracy is one of the more effective birth control mechanisms extant. Iran’s population is already within spitting distance of its projected maximum and will start contracting sometime before mid-century, plus or minus.
That Iran is poverty-stricken and short of basics is not due to Malthusian progression, but due to totalitarian mismanagement and aggressive misbehavior that has resulted in widespread economic sanctions. An autocracy doesn’t have to be communist in order to screw up a national economy.
The recent street demonstrations occurred because the only thing the average Iranian has had a bellyful of recently is theocratic oppression and shortages due to regime mismanagement and misbehavior. There is, in short, no money at home because what isn’t spent on nuclear weapons development goes to what I like to call the “3-H Club” – Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis – and to Shia militias in Iraq. The regime pursues its dreams of empire and of Israel’s destruction at the considerable expense of its long-suffering citizenry.
When the Israelis and the US have shredded the regime sufficiently from the air, the general populace will emerge and finish the job on the ground. I do not anticipate that process being pretty – probably a bit like what the Taliban did to the Soviet-stooge regime once the Russians dragged themselves home in 1989. The IRGC and Basij dead-enders deserve to die ugly and I think the general population of Iran will cheerfully oblige them in that respect.
Iran just isn’t managed well. They can’t build a helicopter but will build missiles. The nuclear weapons are because they want to kill everyone.
Their proxies controlled, Lebanon, Gaza, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. Once they had nukes, those proxies would have expanded their wars against the other gulf states, the USA, and the rest of the world.
Control the spice control the universe
Some religious people seem to get a hate-on about Charles Darwin, as if he invented Eugenics himself. But I think Paul Ehrlich is a much better candidate for a go-to, stereotypical Evil Scientist than Darwin.
Oh, definitely. Darwin merely described reality – what a scientist is supposed to do. Ehrlich peddled a dystopian fever dream for wealth and worldly fame.