I'm currently reading Breakneck, a newish book by Dan Wang, mostly about China. It's very good, but there's a chapter on China's "One Child Policy" (in effect roughly between 1979 and 2015) which revisits the utter depravity and horrors visited upon Chinese women (and babies, disproportionally female) of that era. Wang notes the influence of Western "doomsters" on Chinese policymakers, and one of the loudest Jeremiahs was Paul Ehrlich. Who, as far as I can tell, did not murder any mothers or their babies himself, but…
Well, lets take a look at some of the eulogies for that ghoul, for example this one from Kevin D. Williamson, who points out: Paul Ehrlich Was Wrong About Everything. (archive.today link)
At what point must we be frank about the fact that Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb author who died last week at the age of 93, was not simply wrong about almost everything he ever wrote or said or thought, but positively and culpably dishonest?
If ever there were an intellectual grave that deserves pissing on posthaste, it is Paul Ehrlich’s. So let us commence.
Ehrlich was an intellectual fraud, something he had in common with many of the celebrated pseudoscientists, quacks, and cranks who became intellectual heroes to our era’s progressives, from Sigmund Freud to Noam Chomsky, Rachel Carson, Margaret Sanger, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. until about five minutes ago. (Right-wingers don’t go around reading books by crackpots—they put them into the Cabinet.) Like Karl Marx, another great prophet of the always-wrong-but-never-in-doubt school, Ehrlich believed that there is a kind of science of history and that, consequently, future events could be predicted with great confidence by those who were willing to—all together now!—follow the science. And so Ehrlich, whose academic specialty was the study of butterflies, was famous for his startling predictions—his hilarious, wrong-headed, unsupported, book-mongering predictions.
KDW provides examples aplenty.
Noah Smith also talks about Ehrlich in his daily Roundup, and the One Child Policy is mentioned:
Paul Ehrlich, the author of The Population Bomb and a relentless advocate for population control, has died. One general rule of punditry is supposed to be that you don’t speak ill of the dead. But on the other hand, what if the dead had some really, really bad ideas?
We all know the story of why Ehrlich was wrong. He predicted that the world would run out of food, producing catastrophic famines in the 1970s. Based on those predictions, he called for things like cutting off emergency food aid to India, reasoning that if people were saved from starvation today, it would just mean more people to die of starvation later on. But new farming techniques known as the Green Revolution created enough calories to feed the whole world with plenty to spare. The Population Bomb came out in 1968; by then, famines were essentially already a thing of the past […]
And fertility rates fell without the kind of draconian, dystopian population controls that Ehrlich constantly called for. The main country that listened to Ehrlich was China, and their One-Child Policy turned out to be quite unnecessary for reducing fertility rates — as well as being totalitarian, cruel, and dystopian.
I also liked Jeff Blehar's take (which provided my headline above). Like Noah, he also invokes, and ignores, that old Latin advice:
“De mortuis nil nisi bonum,” the ancients used to say. But then again the ancients didn’t know Paul Ehrlich: academic biologist, popular economist, author of infamous tract The Population Bomb, and dead at the ripe old age of 93. (I’d like to think that in that case, they’d have found at least a few choice words.) So, although I know Noah Rothman already bit off a large chunk of this yesterday morning, allow me to add my own brief “vaya con diablo” to the single most destructive social economist the West has seen since the applied works of V. I. Lenin.
Ehrlich was famous for becoming, in the early ’70s, the mainstream face of what can only be called “anti-human environmentalism”: that radical strain of quasi-theological belief that regards humanity as an unnatural and corrupting blight upon the earth, and whose unyielding prescription is human population reduction. He merely cloaked his religious tenets in the then-trendy language of ecology and science, which meant that he found himself chanting from a recognizably old pseudoscientific psalter: the Malthusian apocalypse.
“The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” began the infamous opening of The Population Bomb. Ehrlich didn’t even bother offering solutions, only an enthusiastic counsel of despair. He predicted a “Great Die-Off” due to insufficient global agricultural capacity, and always with vivid, headline-grabbing flair: “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born.”
So (I have to admit) most of the stuff I've been reading about Ehrlich tends to mention his blood-soaked legacy. Given that, the reliable New York Times obit subhed is truly shocking:
His best-selling 1968 book, which forecast global famines, made him a leader of the environmental movement. But he faced criticism when his predictions proved premature.
"Premature."
The mark of the true believer: when confronted with your prophet's total failure at doom-prediction, just say he got his timing wrong.
Also of note:
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What's the matter with Ireland? A relevant observation for the day comes from Matthew Hennessey, who writes on Ireland’s Obsession With the Jews. (WSJ gifted link)
For one amazing year in the late 1980s, an almost unbelievable pair of facts were true: the mayor of Dublin was Jewish and the president of Israel was Irish.
Ben Briscoe, a Jew, was lord mayor of Ireland’s capital city from June 1988 to June 1989. At the same time, Chaim Herzog, born in Belfast and raised in Dublin, was president of the Jewish state. My father got a huge kick—and a lot of mileage—out of this unlikely state of affairs. As the owner of an Irish bar in our New Jersey hometown, he enjoyed regaling his Jewish friends with this bit of trivia.
As a young man I understood the connection between the Jews and the Irish intuitively: We were two peoples who had been kicked around for centuries and made to feel unwelcome in our own countries. Because of this, and for reasons stemming from a mutual love of stories and song, we shared a natural bond of friendship.
Sadly, that bond is fractured. Since the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks, Ireland has emerged as one of the most unhinged anti-Israel countries in Europe. The Irish political establishment is incorrigible on the subject. The nation’s leadership, following public opinion, has been consistently hostile to Israel’s war of self-defense against Hamas—despite an Irish connection to the conflict via Emily Hand, a 9-year-old Irish-Israeli girl kidnapped and held captive by Hamas for 50 days.
In February 2024 Prime Minister Leo Varadkar accused the Israelis of prosecuting the war on Hamas while “blinded by rage.” Later that year Ireland formally recognized a Palestinian state and backed South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. In response, Israel closed its embassy in Ireland.
I will also point out that Leopold Bloom, protagonist of James Joyce's Ulysses, was kinda Jewish. (Via his father.) Although he converted to Catholicism in order to marry the potty-mouthed Molly.
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Sounds like a sci-fi story title from 1948. Deirdre McCloskey writes on things Not of Human Design.
We humans tend to think of the world from two perspectives only. One is the individual, yourself alone looking out. The other is the top down—the President, Brasília, the Boss, the gods, God. Both are conscious. And so our world seems to us populated by intentions—what I want to do this afternoon or what the Boss wants me to do tomorrow.
Such a world is soaked in ethics. Lula does this, Donald does that, for good or ill. I myself alone do this or that, likewise. We can blame the person, because such a world has only persons. Ethics applies only to people. We do not blame the rain for falling. We do blame Donald for starting a war without proper care.
The old way of labeling unintended consequences was to call them God’s will, or fate, or some secret human design. We do tend to personalize them, blaming inflation on, say, the “greed” of the shopkeeper. Theologically speaking, the so-called “problem of evil” comes from blaming an allegedly benevolent God for the existence of evils in the world.
Deirdre (writing from Brazil) notes a big example: "the Portuguese language". It's only used by humans, but was … Not of Human Design!
I think there's a relevant Hayek quote out there on this, but I can't find it right now.
[Update 2026-03-18: Ah, found it:
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
From (it says here) page 76 of The Fatal Conceit.]
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Have I mentioned lately that the FCC should be destroyed? Yeah, two days ago. But in case you were looking for one more reason for that, Joe Lancaster reports: FCC Chair Brendan Carr threatens media outlets that don't report good Iran war news.
Amid a war in the Middle East that is, despite his assurances, still very much unresolved, President Donald Trump spent a substantial portion of the weekend posting on social media, including complaints about the news coverage that the war is getting.
"Yet again, an intentionally misleading headline by the Fake News Media," Trump groused in a Truth Social post over the weekend. He singled out reports that U.S. refueling planes were hit at an air base in Saudi Arabia, which he called "the exact opposite of the actual facts" and said the reporters were "truly sick and demented people that have no idea the damage they cause the United States of America."
But as Reason's Matthew Petti notes, "Trump acknowledged the report was true, and he took issue with something it didn't actually say." Indeed, The Wall Street Journal reported the planes "were struck and damaged," and Trump's post complained that "the planes were not 'struck' or 'destroyed.'" (The Journal report uses the word destroyed in a later paragraph, referring to all refueling planes that have been damaged since the war began.)
But instead of this being just another of Trump's many misinformed social media missives we've become numb to over the years, a high-ranking member of Trump's administration jumped in to back up Trump's gripes with more explicit threats.
Yes, that "high-ranking member" was FCC thug Brendan Carr.
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