Walter Williams wrote a column a dozen years ago in which he made some wild claims about Stanford population biologist Paul Ehrlich.
What did he really say? Stanford University Prof. Paul R. Ehrlich – L A Cicero image
Williams wrote:
Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb, widely read on college campuses during the late sixties. Ehrlich predicted that there’d be a major food shortage in the U.S. and “in the 1970s . . . hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” He forecast that 65 million Americans would die of starvation between 1980 and 1989, and that by 1999 the U.S. population would have declined to 22.6 million. Ehrlich’s predictions about England were worse: “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”
Recently Williams revived that claim for another column, and the revived claim is all over conservative sites.
Steven Goddard, who appears to be making a living on screwing up references to the work of others, though had restricted most of his error to sciency issues like climate change denial, put up a post repeating Williams’ claim.
I imagined Ehrlich might have said something like that, but most likely in one of his “scenarios” like the three much different disaster scenarios he proposed in his 1968 book Population Bomb. So I asked Goddard for a reference (pollution and economic scarcity, disease, and food shortages, were the three apocalyptic horsemen Ehrlich wrote about then).
It didn’t occur to me that the quote attributed to Ehrlich was wholly fictitious, but in more than a week of searching, neither Goddard nor Maurizio Moribito commenting at Goddard’s site can find anything even close to what Williams claimed. I’ve pored through my old copy of Population Bomb, and it’s not there that I can find, not without a much more thorough reading I don’t have time for right now. (My copy of Ehrlich’s Population, Resources and Environment is buried somewhere here in my bookshelves — that was the textbook Ehrlich wrote, a book used in a population and ecology course I took in the Biology Department at the University of Utah way back when. It’s also a favorite book for conservatives to quote mine, wringing fantastic mischaracterizations from the early edition or a later one where Ehrlich and his wife were joined by John Holdren, now an adviser to President Obama.)
Dear Readers, help me out: Did Ehrlich say anything like what Williams via Goddard claims he said, or did Williams pluck this smear from a some unlighted private library? Was Williams just playing fast and loose with the truth (again)?
Did Ehrlich ever “predict” 65 million deaths from starvation in America in the 1980s? Can anyone source the quote?
More, strings to follow:
- Court in India questions why starvation deaths are allowed to occur
- In Arabia, Sir Bob Geldof warns of food wars and starvation deaths if food distribution problems are not fixed (1 billion suffering chronic hunger in 2010)
- North Korea to blame for North Korean food shortages
- Arusha region of Tanzania suffering food shortages
- U.S. lifted trade sanctions on Sudanese bank
- Economist: Only 10 million children under 5 starved to death in 2006
- Malnutrition deaths to elderly in the U.S.
Even more stuff on the topic:
- Seed magazine interview of and story about Ehrlich, August 4, 2009
- Nearly-rational discussion of Population Bomb at Primate Diaries, the blog; note especially the discussion of “nuclear winter,” a discussion that “global warming skeptics” frequently quote mine and misappropriate odd quotes from.
- Notes on Ehrlich’s bet with Julian Simon, and why it cannot be analogized to global warming — at Economix, a New York Times blog
- New York Times review of the Ehrlichs’ 1990 book The Population Explosion; according to the review, the answer to over-immigration from Mexico is to beef up Mexico’s economy so the economic drivers of emigration from Mexico are reduced. This is the opposite of what commenters at Goddards blog claim.
Posted by Ed Darrell 
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