The Population Bomb
by Paul R. Ehrlich · first published 1968
38mentions
1recommended by
29HN commenters
2012–2026first – last mentioned
3% recommend57% neutral40% critical
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…spheres, especially anywhere near academia, starting in the 1970s. If I had to trace it to one source it would probably be the Club of Rome and Limits to Growth. Paul Erlich would be a close second with The Population Bomb. Here’s a great podcast on the latter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nn1gieFMuWI This stuff sounds right because obviously you can’t have infinite growth in population or resource use on a finite…
on “No more than 100 000 faint satellites should orbit Earth” ↗…that 'whatever the rate of population growth is, historically it has been that the food supply increases at least as fast, if not faster.'" I am old enough to remember when the ideas in the book The Population Bomb seemed like fresh, new ideas. Decades later, the world Ehrlich and I still live in seems more like a confirmation of criticisms of the book[1] than like a confirmation of the book. Since the book was…
on “The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion” ↗…white goods, electronic tech etc., etc. - then that extra demand on the planet's resources will be enormous. What's worried me for a long time - ever since I read Anne and Paul Ehrlich's 1968 book The Population Bomb is that the population will outstrip our ability to find extra resources to support this population growth. Whilst the Ehrlichs overestimated the exponential growth rate I evertheless reckon the evidence…
on “World Population Clock: 7.96B People (2022)” ↗…them, going back a decade or so. Charles Galton Darwin's The Next Million Years (1952), Harrison Brown, et al's more modest The Next Hundred Years (1957), Meadows et al, Limits to Growth, Ehrlich's The Population Bomb, Richard Meier's Science and Economic Development (1955, 1965). Some agreement, some disagreement, and interesting insights, as with all technical debugging processes, on what they got right and what…
on “Paul Krugman Reviews ‘The Rise and Fall of American Growth’ by Robert J. Gordon” ↗…attempts at rectifying things so far have been little more than tokenism - and we're still just pissing around the edges. Pessimistic yes, but factually true. Ever since Paul Ehrlich and his book The Population Bomb (1968) many have been circumspect about discussing population growth. Too outspoken for his own good, Ehrlich hit a very raw nerve when he mentioned human reproduction and overpopulation together, as…
on “‘The Greens want to take our meat away’: Europeans go to war over their dinner” ↗https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_R._Ehrlich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb https://openlibrary.org/works/OL3294965W/The_Population_Bomb
on “Paul R. Ehrlich, Who Alarmed the World with 'The Population Bomb,' Dies at 93” ↗…anyone who does. For example, Stanford Professor Paul R. Ehrlich (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_R._Ehrlich) and his wife Anne received considerable criticism for their widely read 1968 book The Population Bomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb. That said, the Ehrlichs published that book 53 years ago and I'd suggest that now, given the huge amounts of newly-measured environmental data and much…
on “Ask HN: Why Aren't You Vegan?” ↗…birth rates have been declining in first-world countries for a long time in the absence of this kind of constraint, and the Foreign Affairs article specifically notes that both Malthus and Paul Ehrlich's "Population Bomb" doomsday resource-shortage scenarios didn't come to pass. The Earth certainly does have some kind of carrying capacity for humans, but that's not the limit that's being it, it's something else.
on “The Population Bust” ↗…late 1700s, thus avoiding the massive famines he predicted in the Western world, that's exactly what happened. He would have been right had nothing changed. But things do. The same thing with Ehrlich's "Population Bomb" in the 1960s. He didn't predict that in many Western nations (and even China) that the number of children would soon go the other way -- below the number needed for replacement, leading to a smaller,…
on “Why Pessimism Sounds Smart” ↗…and personal freedom and democratic limited government have spread around the world. http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/readers-digest.aspx AFTER EDIT: Do any of you remember reading the book The Population Bomb (1968) by Paul Ehrlich in your youth? I was amazed last week to discover a friend a bit younger than I am (born in the 1960s, a few years before the book was published) had never heard of the book. I've…
on “Hot, crowded, and running out of fuel: Earth of 2050 a scary place” ↗Authors are Paul and Anne Ehrlich, authors of the famous 1968 book "The Population Bomb" [1]. From early editions of that book: "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.…
on “Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided?” ↗…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...." Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, 1968 His first sentence appears to be correct - just not in the direction he meant. He's still making similar doom-laden predictions, and still getting paid lots of money for them.
on “Drowning in grain: historically high supplies and low prices” ↗Cold War, H-Bomb, "duck and cover", nuclear winter, Threads. Red Scare (first and second), Communist takeover, "better dead than red". Ehrlich's The Population Bomb predicting world-wide famine by the 1980s, followed by the Zero Population Growth movement. The destruction of the ozone hole. For the more Biblical prophecy oriented, "The Late, Great Planet Earth",…
on “The human body is already close to thermal limits in many regions” ↗We've explicitly avoided the predictions that Paul Ehrlich made in The Population Bomb: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager Predictions without deadlines are not useful because you can keep kicking the can down the road forever. That's exactly what Paul Ehrlich has…
on “Birds Are Vanishing from North America” ↗…arable, but humans have successfully terraformed throughout history and conceivably will become more capable with technological advances. Malthus is not unique in his prognostications. Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968) was more recent and predicted mass famine by the 1970s. Instead, we produce a massive surplus of food each year, although it’s not distributed adequately at present. This happened well after the…
on “The Global Fertility Crash” ↗