The Doomsayers

Concern that population growth
would strain resources is a worry that goes back literally thousands of
years. The most prominent advocate of this view in more recent history
was the Rev. Thomas Malthus who became famous for his 18th century book,
Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthus predicted that the
growing European population would quickly outstrip available resources.

Malthus turned out to be wrong,
but biologist Paul Ehrlich picked up
where Malthus left off with his 1969 book, The Population Bomb.
Ehrlich combined the ideas of Malthus and others with sensationalistic
imagery about the horrors of a world with too many people. The Population
Bomb predicted that tens of millions of people would starve
to death in the 1970s following an inevitable crash of the global food
supply. Dwindling natural resources such as oil would soon be used up
and the world ran a real risk of returning to a pre-industrial dark age.

EhrlichÂ’s book was taken very
seriously and he became something of a media celebrity in the 1970s, writing
numerous other books on the topic and making repeated appearances on the
Johnny Carson Show. The popularity of EhrlichÂ’s book spawned a mini-industry
of books on overpopulation, many seeking to up the ante of dire predictions.
William and Paul Paddock wrote
a then-popular, but now almost forgotten, book ineptly titled Famine
1975!. The Paddocks argued that rich, developed nations should stop
sending food aid to help Third World countries that were doomed anyway.
They included a list of nations that they considered beyond redemption,
even though some of their doomed nations later became net food exporters.

Perhaps the biggest coup for
the advocates of limiting population growth was ChinaÂ’s 1979 adoption
of the controversial one-child policy.
At least in theory, having more than one child requires permission from
the Chinese government. Not everyone was pleased with the Chinese implementation
of the one-child policy. Environmentalist Garrett
Hardin complained that the Chinese government lacked the will to properly
enforce the policy and unless it took more draconian measures to prevent
couples from having more than one child the policy was doomed to fail.

Of course what failed were
the apocalyptic predictions. Most indicators of human well being improved
dramatically in the last quarter of the 20th century. But why didnÂ’t tens
of millions of people starve to death as Ehrlich and others predicted?
And what can those failed predictions of the 1970s tell us about the relationship
between population and resources?

<-- Introduction
Population Growth –>