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IPFS News Link • General Opinion

Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb Has Been Officially Defused

• technocracy.news By Noah Smith

However, both had a mind stained by Scientism, which holds that discoverable truth is only found through science. Today's fact is that the birth rate is falling like a rock. ? TN Editor

Some of the most spectacularly wrong predictions in history have been made by those who claim that overpopulation is going to swamp the planet. Thomas Malthus, a British economist writing in the late 1700s, is the most famous of these. Extrapolating past trends into the future, he predicted that population growth would inevitably swamp available food resources, leading to mass starvation. That didn't happen — we continued to develop new technologies that let us stay ahead of the reaper.

In 1968, Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich wrote "The Population Bomb," warning that unchecked population growth would lead to mass starvation in the 1970s. He was just as wrong as Malthus. Global population did surge, but food production managed to keep up.

So far, the prophets of overpopulation have been defeated by technology. But human ingenuity alone can never deliver a final victory in the battle to feed the world — eventually, population growth will overwhelm the Earth's ability to provide calories. That's why in order to put Malthus and Ehrlich finally to rest, a second component is needed — lower fertility rates. To save both the environment and themselves, humans must have fewer kids.


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