The man who bet against humanity — and lost

MSN.com ^ | March 21, 2026 | Bryan Walsh

[E. Pluribus Unum]

On February 9, 1970, Johnny Carson did something that would be unthinkable for a late night host today, or really anyone on TV: He gave a full hour of The Tonight Show to a Stanford professor.

But Paul Ehrlich, the author along with his wife Anne of the blockbuster book The Population Bomb, was charismatic, telegenic, and absolutely terrifying. He told Carson’s massive audience that hundreds of millions of people were about to starve to death. Nothing could stop it.

Ehrlich’s first appearance on The Tonight Show demonstrates a lot of things, not least how much popular TV has changed. (I’m struggling to imagine Carson’s eventual successor Jimmy Fallon giving an hour to, say, CRISPR inventor Jennifer Doudna — and without even doing a lip sync battle.) But it also shows just how influential Ehrlich was.

He would go on The Tonight Show more than 20 times. The Population Bomb sold over 2 million copies and became one of the most popular science books of the 20th century. His work helped popularize a broader population-panic worldview that influenced policymakers in the US and abroad, including coercive family-planning policies in countries such as India and China. Ehrlich and his book fundamentally changed the world we live in today.

And yet Ehrlich, who died last week at 93, turned out to be spectacularly wrong, wrong in ways that had major consequences for humanity. But precisely because he was wrong and yet so influential, understanding why his views were so popular is necessary for understanding why doomsaying remains so seductive — and so dangerous. 

The book that went off like a bomb

The Population Bomb, I suspect, was one of those of-the-moment books that was more owned than read. But you didn’t need...

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KEYWORDS: spammingfr; vox

[CharlesOConnell]

Population, the bomb that imploded.

https://youtu.be/xvlt_JId91M?si=2NiTRJhEqKARWBWA

[DoodleBob]

This is my favorite Ehrlich story:

"The face-off occurred in the pages of Social Science Quarterly, where Simon challenged Ehrlich to put his money where his mouth was. In response to Ehrlich's published claim that 'If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000' - a proposition Simon regarded as too silly to bother with -

Simon countered with 'a public offer to stake US$10,000 ... on my belief that the cost of non-government-controlled raw materials (including grain and oil) will not rise in the long run... If the inflation-adjusted prices of the various metals rose in the interim, Simon would pay Ehrlich the combined difference; if the prices fell, Ehrlich et alia would pay Simon. ... Between 1980 and 1990, the world's population grew by more than 800 million, the largest increase in one decade in all of history. But by September 1990, without a single exception, the price of each of Ehrlich's selected metals had fallen, and in some cases had dropped through the floor. Chrome, which had sold for $3.90 a pound in 1980, was down to $3.70 in 1990. Tin, which was $8.72 a pound in 1980, was down to $3.88 a decade later." [1]

As a result, in October 1990, Paul Ehrlich mailed Julian Simon a check for $576.07 to settle the wager in Simon's favor.

Here is that check. Ehrlich was such a low-life, the he made his WIFE sign the check.

[KC_Conspirator]

The same bad predictions by liberals go on today.

[equaviator]

George Carlin- The Planet Is Fine

https://youtu.be/UTPlKwkryEk

[Optimist]

perhaps if not for Ehrlich, we would not have developed the food agriculture improvements that have enabled us to feed the multitudes that we in fact DO have today. Of course his climate predictions were wrong, but the population HAS exploded. We have just adapted in time to handle it. he’s still a misguided despicable individual who considered Eugenics and population control to be the only solution.

[xp38]

If you look at this paperback cover the basic message is babies are evil. Imagine how this warped how people looked at abortion and infants in general.

[Reeses]

None of this means we should ignore environmental problems. Climate change is real, and Ehrlich was relatively early in flagging it.

This thought missile failed to reach the target conclusion and exploded spectacularly in flight.

[montag813]

I wonder how much this demon was responsible for the LOW population CRISIS we have now.

[Ditto]

perhaps if not for Ehrlich, we would not have developed the food agriculture improvements that have enabled us to feed the multitudes that we in fact DO have today.

Nonsense! The Green Revolution was already underway when Ehrlich was spouting his BS. Ehrlich was a hustler who knew many people like scary stories. He made lots of money from them.

[montag813]

The 1973 dystopian film Soylent Green is loosely based on the 1966 science fiction novel Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison, but its thematic core was heavily influenced by the 1960s counterculture concern over runaway population growth, most notably Paul R. Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb.

[Ditto]

perhaps if not for Ehrlich, we would not have developed the food agriculture improvements that have enabled us to feed the multitudes that we in fact DO have today.

Nonsense! The Green Revolution was already underway when Ehrlich was spouting his BS. Ehrlich was a hustler who knew many people like scary stories. He made lots of money from them.

[Optimist]

The 1973 dystopian film Soylent Green
and yet, it seems soy is the magical ingredient in almost every mass-food product. Coincidence? are we at the beginning of the Soylent green era?

[Honorary Serb]

This guy was responsible for the Green Revolution—not Erlich:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug

It takes optimistic hard workers like Borlaug to make things like this happen—not doomsayers!

[Fungi]

Ehrlich lost but he never gave up the con.

[chuckee]

Erlich was the Paul Krugman of his day, pretty much wrong about every prognostication. He also predicted we would be dying of thirst by 1984 and that water resources would have been exhausted, all sea life would be gone, etc. The guy was a pompous smug moron.

[ansel12]

I don’t think so.

[Steely Tom]

I remember seeing his book in the window of the bookstore I loved to go to. I was either in seventh or eighth grade when it came out, to huge fanfare.

There was a big display, with a large poster that said "The Population Bomb," and underneath, in letters that were made to look like graffiti, Is everyone's baby. The poster showed a black spherical bomb with a lit fuse.

I was old enough to get the double-entendre.

I thought the message was thought-provoking, but I didn't take it very seriously; at that time, there was so much craziness and apocalyptic thinking going on, the "population bomb" thing was just one straw in a hurricane. I was big into science fiction, and it seemed like every other SF novel was about thermonuclear war, and the aftermath of thermonuclear war. I had recently read Arthur Clarke's novel Childhood's End, and that was another take on the end of the human race as we know it.

I had a Scientific American subscription, and articles about overpopulation and attempts to get poor people to use birth control were a repeated subject for that magazine back then.

[Fiji Hill]

I saw Paul Ehrlich when he made an appearance at Occidental College during my freshman year. He called on the middle class to essentially birth-control itself out of existence and urged every young man in the audience to get a vasectomy.

[Ge0ffrey]

Carson was another elitist liberal pied piper leading people astray.