Paul Ehrlich was not an ayatollah, or Hitler, or even a Vladimir Putin. He didn’t personally order the execution of millions or the starvation of Ukrainian farmers as Stalin did.
But, through his political and cultural influence, he helped inspire many of the most damaging and evil policies in human history.
Ehrlich helped inspire policies that led to forced abortions and sterilizations, the impoverishment of billions, and the strangling of third-world economies. His “population bomb” idiocy convinced millions to sacrifice their fertility to a false god,
Ehrlich may own the record for failed predictions in human history. Tarot card readers, or those who read the entrails of sacrificed animals have better records of predictions than he. Yet the media still treats him as a prophet.
“Premature,” lol. The abject refusal to just admit this guy was completely wrong is one of the funnier Boomer-coded traits. pic.twitter.com/oM5GYgDEtR
— Sonny Bunch (@SonnyBunch) March 16, 2026
Ehrlich helped set The Narrative™, and he was trotted out as an expert until his death, and will be celebrated as a humanist for decades to come.
“The next few decades will be the end of the kind of civilization we’re used to.”
Humanity is consuming 175 percent of what the earth can regenerate. Biologist Paul Erlich says that our current way of life is unsustainable. pic.twitter.com/MU1jHpuMwI
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) January 2, 2023
Ehrlich was and will remain a hero to the left, despite the fact that he was among the most racist people to have ever lived. He started his crusade after a trip to India, in which he discovered that they were dirty, disgusting people who needed to die, and he pushed mass sterilization projects that mutilated millions of Indians, Chinese, and African people to ensure that their populations plummeted.
Paul Ehrlich demanded coercion against the global poor to limit population growth. He got the US, World Bank to enforce his ideas on India, which ended up sterilizing 8 million.
Those opposed to efforts to sterilize them were accused by the media of spreading misinformation. pic.twitter.com/OOjm4ZD70u
— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) May 16, 2023
Chapter one of the Population Bomb begins thusly:
I have understood the population explosion intellectually for a long time. I came to understand it emotion-~y one stinking hot night in Delhi a few years ago. My wife daughter and I were returning to our hotel in an ancient taxi. The seats were hopping with fteas. The only functional gear was third. As we crawled through the city, we entered a crowded slum area. The temperature was well over 100, and the air was a haze of dust and smoke. The streets seemed alive with people.P~J?le eating, people washing, people sleeping. People, . Visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their···+~ hands through the taxi window, begging. People’ defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people.As we moved slowly through the mob hand bomsquawking, the dust, noise, heat, and cooling fires gave the scene a hellish aspect. Would we ever get to our hotel? All three of us were, frankly, frightened. It seemed that anything could happen, of course, nothing did.
Ehrlich’s reaction to seeing people in poverty was not to find policies that would help them. It was to find ways to kill them.
This is the idea that set the world on fire with enthusiasm.
In the 1960s, India was only producing 10 million tons of wheat a year.
In 2023, it expects to produce 112 million tons.
Every 1% increase in population corresponded to a 5.66% increase in wheat production—the opposite of what Paul Ehrlich predicted.https://t.co/BJa2l0nDbb
— Human Progress (@HumanProgress) January 30, 2023
In the years between Ehrlich’s epiphany that people must be killed off and today, the world has become infinitely more wealthy, billions have been lifted out of poverty, famines are a thing of the past, with wars being the only cause of mass starvation. Of course, socialism drives people to the brink, but that is another story, and another favorite policy of the people who admire Ehrlich.
Contrary to Ehrlich’s disastrous forecasts, hunger has fallen, raw materials have gotten cheaper, and living standards have risen. Doomsday narratives sell, but they’re not reality. The world is getting better in so many ways. https://t.co/tRR182blAr
— Billy Binion (@billybinion) March 16, 2026
Ehrlich is far more celebrated by the Establishment than Norman Borlaug, who almost singlehandedly saved billions of lives and helped lift people out of poverty.
Ehrlich published in 1968.
In 1970 Borlaug won the Nobel prize for accomplishments over the preceding three *decades*.
When Ehrlich wrote, the Green Revolution was already well underway, and fertility rates were already declining in e.g. India.
He was just an evil person. https://t.co/thynfuUUTl
— Lyman Stone 石來民 🦬🦬🦬 (@lymanstoneky) March 16, 2026
The attraction of intellectuals to evil ideas has become a constant. The more often Ehrlich was proven to be a false prophet, the more awards he collected and the more respect the establishment heaped on him.
The list of his awards is impressive, and Ehrlich loved to trot them out as proof that his critics were wrong.
The John Muir Award of the Sierra Club- The Gold Medal Award of the World Wildlife Fund International
- A MacArthur Prize Fellowship
- The Crafoord Prize, awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and considered the highest award given in the field of ecology
- ECI Prize winner in terrestrial ecology, 1993
- A World Ecology Award from the International Center for Tropical Ecology, University of Missouri, 1993
- The Volvo Environmental Prize, 1993
- The United Nations Sasakawa Environment Prize, 1994
- The 1st Annual Heinz Award in the Environment (with Anne Ehrlich), 1995[50]
- The Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, 1998
- The Dr. A. H. Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences, 1998
- The Blue Planet Prize, 1999
- The Eminent Ecologist Award of the Ecological Society of America, 2001
- The Distinguished Scientist Award of the American Institute of Biological Sciences, 2001
- Ramon Margalef Prize in Ecology of the Generalitat of Catalonia, 2009[51]
- Fellow of the Royal Society of London 2012[1]
- 2013 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Ecology and Conservation Biology
Credentials as proof of prescience. It is the perfect example of what is wrong with contemporary society, and why the trust in expertise has plummeted.
Predicting that civilization would end by 1985 counts as a pretty basic error, I’d think. To the extent he’s received scientific accolades, it shows how unseriously the scientific community takes prediction. pic.twitter.com/IAIhx8whY5
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) January 4, 2023
Ironically, the vast majority of people who admire Ehrlich today are the educated elite. The people who “trust the science.”
Ordinary people long ago saw through this nonsense. The Davos crowd lives their lives by it.
Where, on this chart, is the evidence that Ehrlich’s predictions of inevitable, imminent, worsening global famine, starting in the 1960s, were “premature” rather than wrong? pic.twitter.com/BqjfhS0Z2t
— Matt Ridley (@mattwridley) March 16, 2026
Unfortunately, the Davos crowd has a near monopoly on policy in the West, and where they do not, they work night and day to destroy their opponents.
As I said in my earlier piece, we live in opposite world.
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