Yesterday saw a flurry of articles about Paul Ehrlich's magnum opus, The Population Bomb. It's fair to say that, although it brought Ehrlich fame and a career, history has not been kind to the book and there is no shortage of people lining up to point out what a disaster it was for people in poor countries. Matt Novak at Gizmodo is a case in point:
Ehrlich’s predictions led to real action. In India, millions of people were sterilized by the government, sometimes forcibly. His views were embraced by wealthy people in the developing world who could insist that the poor were poor because they were having too many children — an argument that’s not uncommon here in 21st century America.
I think it's also fair to say that many of those who are lining up to criticise Ehrlich today would have been in the frontline of his supporters in the late 1960s. Ehrlich had caught the zeitgeist, a bandwagon was on the roll, and careers were being made out of the prophecies of doom. In the face of such economic forces, the ability of the political and media classes to brush aside dissent or, in academia, to crush it entirely is simply a depressing fact of life.
No doubt people at the time decried what Ehrlich and his minions were doing. Similarly, you can raise the uncomfortable issue of bans on aid for fossil-fuel power stations in the developing world, but the response is to bat the point aside, typically with some reference to cynicism. Motivational fallacies aside, one can't help but wonder if younger BH readers mightn't end up reading a New York Times retrospective in fifty years' time and wondering how it was people in the first years of the twenty-first century could do this to Africans.