I guess you didn't read his early stuff.
All about how we would have a calorie allowance and of course what food we got would be fake.
Farmer in the Sky was all about people having to farm other planets because of food shortages on earth.
Read "Expanded Universe" (the 1980 version) where he talks about his predictions for the year 2000 and how he hit or missed.
This was prediction number 6
We'll all be getting a little hungry by and by.
Not necessarily. In 1950 I was too pessimistic concerning population. Now I suspect that the controlling parameter is oil. In modern agriculture oil is the prime factor -- as power for farm machinery (obviously) but also for insecticides and fertilizers. Since our oil policies in Washington are about as boneheaded -- counterproductive -- as they can be, I have no way to guess how much food we can raise in 2000 A.D. But no one in the United States should be hungry in 2000 A.D. -- unless we are conquered and occupied. -Heinlein 1980
This was prediction number 18
Fish and yeast will become our principle sources of proteins. Beef will be a luxury; lamb and mutton will disappear.
I'll hedge number eighteen just a little. Hunger is not now a problem in the USA, and need not be in the year 2000 -- but hunger is a world problem and would at once become an acute problem for us if we were conquered... a distinct possibility by 2000. Between our present status and that of subjugation lies a whole spectrum of political and economic possible shapes to the future under which we would share the worldwide hunger to a greater or lesser extent. And the problem grows. We can expect to have to feed around half a billion Americans circa year 2000 -- our present huge surpluses would then represent acute shortages even if we never shipped a ton of wheat to India. -Heinlein 1966
It would now appear that the USA population in 2000 A.D. will be about 270,000,000 instead of 500,000,000. I have been collecting clippings on demography for forty years; all that the projections have in common is that all of them are wrong. Even that figure of 270,000,000 may be too high; today the only reason our population continues to increase is that we oldsters are living longer; our current birthrate is not sufficient even to replace the parent generation.-Heinlein 1980
He said it and he was wrong and he admitted it, well sort of .
I guess you didn't read his early stuff.
I have read everything Heinlein ever published. I started reading Robert Heinlein when I was in 3rd grade... in 1957. I grew up with Robert Heinlen's books and short stories.
Farmer in the Sky was all about people having to farm other planets because of food shortages on earth.
No way!
"Farmer in the Sky" was about a family that chose to emigrate to Ganymede, a moon of Jupiter, and the adventures and tribulations of a Boy Scout in learning to be a pioneer. It is an optimistic viewpoint of the future. No food was or could be exported back to Earth. The point was to make the colony self sufficient. I first learned the concepts of ecology in "Farmer" when Heinlein expounded on the steps necessary to turn the rocky ground of Ganymede into fertile soil.
I challenge you to find any works of Heinlein in which your statement:
He was one of the few of the "we are all going to starve to death" future history writers who had the honesty to later admit that he had totally missed the boat.
applies at all. You won't. In fact, you reveal that you have not read any of his early works if you think that "we are all going to starve to death" in any way represents his fiction's premises.
You may find some comments about "overpopluation" that are merely "asides" about some societal circumstances that may be pressures on various actors in his books... but the themes of his novels are never pessimistic. The fact is that we will be facing population pressures... but the negative consequences of overpopulation are not the themes of any Heinlen fiction. His works are certainly NOT part of an "everybody dies" genre.
Read "Expanded Universe" (the 1980 version) where he talks about his predictions for the year 2000 and how he hit or missed.
The predictions that Heinlein discusses in "Expanded Universe" did not appear in any of his fiction as you implied. Those predictions were made in an essay Heinlein wrote in 1950 as part of a magazine's look forward to the year 2000... I think it was published in the Saturday Evening Post. He had been asked to write a treatise giving his best guesses on how the world would be in 2000. These are the predictions he is writing about in "Expanded Universe." The predictions were mostly based on his treatises on the future that he had written and in discussions he and fellow S.F. writers had.
Look at the quotations you cited. They are not in the form of prose used in fiction... they are the type of writing you would find in a scholarly essay... which is what they are referring to.
Note also, that Heinlein was also correct on some of the "predictions" and stood by them.
The predictions, the societies, and the events, especially the conclusions in his fiction were almost entirely optimistic.
The fact is that most of his early stuff, especially the novels, were written for either Boys Life Magazine or for publisher John W. Campbell, who did not accept stories with negative viewpoints of the future. Campbell did agree to publish the stories written in which America fell under a religious dictatorship, Heinlein's Future History series... because they ended triumphantly with the dictator falling... but Campbell never OK'ed Heinlein to write story of how the Prophet Nehemiah Scudder (By the Thunder of His Wings) came to power.
The vast majority of Heinlein's work is set in a future far beyond the period in which his concerns of hunger and even fears of being conquered and occupied were set. While some of his fiction is based on the premise that population growth would force extra-terrestrial colonization, it was much more benign than you imply. Overall it was extremely optimistic and always took the position that humanity would find an answer.
The one Heinlein novel that I can think of that actually covers this period before 2000 is "The Door Into Summer". His predictions for the year 2000 are almost universally optimistic except for perhaps his hero Danny's job of crushing "brand new ground cars" as they come off the assembly line; cars made only to provide jobs for people who would otherwise be out of work.
One novel he did write during this "Early work" time (1949) was "Sixth Column" that started out with an America conquered and occupied by an Asian Empire (reflecting his concerns about our ignoring the changes taking place in China) but it even ends with America triumphant.
Another novel that depicts a somewhat distopic future is "I Will Fear No Evil" (1970). Contrary to the opinion written earlier in this thread, "Evil" was published while Heinlein had full editorial control. This book is set in an era in which those who can afford it live in protected enclaves while those who can't are threatened with crimes from an underclass of criminals. It still ends optimistically, even though its protagonist, Johann Sebastian Bach Smith, dies from tissue rejection.