One post, as we did last week, isn’t enough to deliver all the denunciation Paul Ehrlich deserved. A classic moment in the debacle unleashed by his Malthusian views, superficial charm, ready sophistry and steady error came in 1980 when relentless, even obsessive optimist Julian Simon offered Ehrlich a bet that would test, in real-world terms and without much room for doubt, whether the latter’s Club-of-Rome worldview was right that humans are, essentially, mouths that consume, or Simon’s perky one that we are, essentially, hands that create. Specifically, Simon said Ehrlich could choose any five commodities he thought would rise in real (inflation-adjusted) price over the next decade. Ehrlich took the apparently sure-fire winner bet, duly lost, and his wife paid up. But as Matt Ridley posted “Ehrlich lost the bet and made a speech about Simon in which he said ‘the one thing we’ll never run out of is imbeciles’.” Sore losers aren’t in short supply either. Or governments keen to put bad ideas into deadly effect.

As one critic expressed it, Ehrlich the legitimate bug expert:

“offered a worldview that ‘insect-ified’ humanity. It denied the unique traits of the human species that have allowed us to escape the Malthusian trap (adaptability, ingenuity, problem-solving), and imposed on us instead a presumed and unending over-breed/over-die cycle that he witnessed elsewhere in nature.”

The Wall Street Journal editorial on Ehrlich’s demise began:

“The Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, who died Friday at age 93, made his most important contribution to the world by losing a bet. It helped educate millions that his ideas about scarcity and human ingenuity were wrong.”

But if so, they were the wrong millions or there weren’t enough of them. Because what makes the situation even more classic, and not in a good way, is that governments worldwide, democratic and horribly tyrannical, also took the bet. But not with their own money. From Communist China’s one-child policy to Jimmy Carter’s hair-cardigan energy economics, they acted on Ehrlich’s insistence that humans were using up the planet and fouling it and must be forced, somehow, to consume less even by, in China’s case, existing less.

Promoting “family planning” including easy access to abortion was also part of a belief that the world was overpopulated or, as P.J. O’Rourke memorably summed it up in the title to the chapter “Overpopulation” in his classic All the Trouble in the World, “Just Enough of Me, Way Too Much of You”. Exactly as, say, John Kerry or Mark Carney believe their massive jet-travel carbon footprint is just right whereas your humble-sedan footprint is far too big.

The spectacle of his riding the crest of a wave of error was so odd he even thought so, to a limited degree. As Wikipedia notes:

“During a 2004 interview, Ehrlich answered questions about the predictions he made in The Population Bomb. He acknowledged that some of what he had published had not occurred, but stated that he felt ‘little embarrassment’ and reaffirmed his basic opinion that overpopulation is a major problem. He noted that, ‘Fifty-eight academies of science said that same thing in 1994, as did the world scientists’ warning to humanity in the same year. My view has become depressingly mainline!’”

Yes. Depressingly since it was so wrong in so many ways.

As Ridley also wrote:

“Paul Ehrlich, the butterfly biologist turned rock star eco-pessimist, has died at the age of 93. That in itself is remarkable because in 1968, he forecast that within the coming decade ‘at least 100–200 million people per year will be starving to death’ and “by 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth’s population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people.’ Furthermore, he warned that by 1980 the life expectancy of the average American would have fallen to 42 years as a result of cancer caused by pesticides. Ehrlich’s life debunked his own statistics. He survived a half-century longer than the average life expectancy he predicted. He also spent his last years as one of more than eight billion people, in an era in which global life expectancy has increased by more than seven hours [a] day since he forecast that it would collapse.”

Pretty bad, huh? But it gets worse:

“Meanwhile, famine has all but gone extinct, with death rates from mass starvation down to a tiny fraction of what they were in the 1960s. Back then, about 30 million people out of a population of approximately three billion died in famines that killed more than 100,000 people each. In the 2010s, 1.1 million out of a population of more than 8 billion died in such episodes—a decline of more than 96 percent in the death rate.”

Awkward, or so you’d think. But evidently not. At least not in some quarters. Not in his own mind, nor in that of guardians of orthodoxy. Ridley continued:

“It is not speaking ill of the dead to point out that Ehrlich was wrong. He wasn’t, as The New York Times said in its obituary this week, ‘premature,’ but radically, completely, spectacularly wrong. He was wrong as soon as he put pen to paper, and went on being wrong for decades afterward.”

Horribly so. Again we quote Ridley:

“Less forgivable than his failed forecasts were the misanthropy and cruelty of his political recommendations. He was indeed laden with honors when he died, including a MacArthur Fellowship (the so-called ‘genius grant’) in 1990 and a fellowship with London’s Royal Society in 2012 – despite forecasting in 1971 that ‘If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.’”

But he was a gambler, at least in taking the bet with Simon. And losing, after first saying he would take this “astonishing offer before other greedy people jump in” only later to claim he’d been “goaded” into it. Loathsome. But not a man to let being wrong dent his self-assurance. (Or those who gave him that grant not in 1970 but in 1990.) Or mellow him toward his fellows.

He wanted what Ridley called “coerced, compulsory population control” before quoting the ghastly man himself:

“The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions. The pain may be intense.”

But not to him. Instead his recommendations included withholding food aid to India unless and until its government forcibly sterilized every man with more than three children. Yuck. Smelly shouting brown people. No, really. Ridley quotes a passage we won’t about how disgusting he found New Delhi with all its loathsome loud people.

Shocking? Well, it gets worse. Ehrlich, says Ridley:

“was ‘astounded’ that libertarians objected when the American government took up his suggestion. In 1975, Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi was threatened with the loss of World Bank loans unless she began sterilizing people. She obliged, and her son Sanjay carried out a program making permits, licenses, rations, and even housing applications conditional on sterilization. Over 8 million people were sterilized.”

Way too many of them. No Americans were thus treated. Just enough of us. To Ehrlich’s frustration, as he also wanted Washington to get into “legislating the size of the family” and “throw you in jail” if you bred excessively as he judged the matter.

So whenever you hear “experts say” used as a rhetorical club, or hear climate alarmists start muttering about coercion if we won’t give up living well, or at all, just on being hectored, remember Paul Ehrlich, who wished you’d never been born but very much liked being alive himself.