.... Along with Ehrlich, [Stewart Brand, a former disciple of Ehrlich's who’s now a critic] led a movement of Americans who took to heart his call for “a system of incentives and penalties,” to reduce childbearing, even “by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.” Ehrlich and his followers proposed “responsibility prizes” for childless marriages, a steep tax on families with more than three children, even a “blacklist of people, companies, and organizations impeding population control.”
But it was in other parts of the world where the idea behind Ehrlich's book really took root. Throughout the 70s, the Indian government undertook a program of population control that saw more than eight million women surgically sterilized. Untold numbers of these procedures were forced, and many resulted in death. The patients, in the words of one Indian family-planning official, “were treated like cattle.” And China, with its infamous One Child Policy, took even more drastic measures.
None of this defused the population bomb, though. What did, argues Brand, were advances in agriculture and economics in developing nations—advances Ehrlich could have never foreseen, and which his worldview precluded. And so today, despite an increase of four billion people, fewer people today suffer from extreme poverty or hunger than when Ehrlich wrote the book. Explaining Ehrlich's failed prediction, Indian Economist Gita Sen told The Times, “There's a tendency to apply to human beings the same sort of models that may apply for the insect world.” The difference? We’re not insects. “[H]uman beings are conscious beings, and we do all kinds of things to change our destiny.”
Thanks for posting this, wagglebee!