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The Population Bomb

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The Population Bomb (1968) is a book written by Paul R. Ehrlich. A best-selling work, it predicted disaster for humanity due to overpopulation and the "population explosion". The book predicted that "in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death", that nothing can be done to avoid mass famine greater than any in the history, and radical action is needed to limit the overpopulation.

The book is primarily a repetition of the Malthusian catastrophe argument, that population growth will outpace agricultural growth unless controlled. It assumes that the population is going to raise exponentially, on the other hand the resources, in particular food, are already at their limits.

Unlike Thomas Malthus, Ehrlich predicted that not only the overpopulation will hit in some indefinite future, but it is certain to lead to a massive disaster in the next few years. Also unlike Malthus, Ehrlich didn't see any means of avoiding the catastrophe, and the solutions for limiting its scope he proposed were much more radical, including starving whole countries that refused to implement population control measures.

"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. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate..."

The book deals not only with food shortage, but also with other kinds of crises caused by rapid population growth, expressing the possibility of disaster in broader terms. A "population bomb", as defined in the book, requires only three things:

  • A rapid rate of change
  • A limit of some sort
  • Delays in perceiving the limit

Also worth noting is Ehrlich's introduction of the Impact formula:

I = PAT (where I=Impact, PAT = Population x Affluence x Technology)

Hence, Ehrlich argues, affluent technological nations have a greater per capita impact than poorer nations.

The predictions not only did not come true, the world developed in a direction completely opposite to the one predicted by Ehrlich, without implementing any of his proposed measures. The world food production grows exponentially at a rate much higher than the population growth, in both developed and developing countries, partially due to the efforts of Norman Borlaug's "Green Revolution" of the 1960s, and the food per capita level is the highest in the history. On the other hand population growth rates significantly slowed down, especially in the developed world [1]. The famine has not been eliminated, but its root cause is political instability, not global food shortage [2]. On the other hand, in the 1980s and 1990s in a number of countries (first of all in Tropical Africa) population growth rates still exceeded the economic growth ones, and on quite a few occasions political instability was caused just by food shortages (see, for example, Secular Cycles and Millennial Trends in Africa by Andrey Korotayev and Daria Khaltourina).

Although Ehrlich’s theory influenced 1960’s and 1970's public policy, a post-analysis by Keith Greiner (1994) observed that Ehrlich’s projections could not possibly have held the scrutiny of time because Ehrlich applied the financial compound interest formula to population growth. Using two sets of assumptions based on the Ehrlich theory, it was shown that the theorized growth in population and subsequent scarcity of resources could not have occurred on Ehrlich’s time schedule. The historical US population growth was more linear than exponential. Nevertheless The Population Bomb sold many copies and raised the general awareness of population and environmental issues. Early 21st century analyses of the age distribution of the US population show that growth in population declined after “the pill” was approved for widespread use (though the population continues to grow at a rate of 0.91% per annum [3]). That approval was likely influenced by Ehrlich’s work. (Reference: Greiner, K. (1994, Winter). The baby boom generation and How they Grew, Chance: A Magazine of the American Statistical Association.)

There has been much criticism of the book from demographers today (chiefly Phillip Longman in his 2004 The Empty Cradle) who argue that the "baby boom" of the 1950s was an aberration unlikely to be repeated and that population decline in an urbanized society is by nature hard to prevent because of the economic liability children become. Paleoconservatives have been especially critical of the ideas of the book: The Population Bomb made the Intercollegiate Studies Institute's 50 Worst Books of the Twentieth Century in 2003 and was #11 ("honorable" mention) in Human Events' Ten Most Harmful Books of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. It should be noted, however, that both of these organizations are highly partisan. Darwin's The Origin of Species was also an Honorable Mention on Human Events' list.

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