I originally meant this column to be about three very foolish ideas of three very foolish leftists: Gavin Newsom, Kathy Hochul and Paul Ehrlich. But as I started writing about Ehrlich, I realized that the column would be too long. So I’m saving the two blue-state governors for next time.
Paul Ehrlich died at 93 on March 13th. He may have been the most pure distillation of a leftist academic in the world, except that (as far as I know) he wasn’t obsessed with racism and sexism. But he covered pretty much the rest of the leftist catechism. He was arrogant and sure of his superior knowledge, no matter how many times over how many decades his ideas were decisively (and humiliatingly) proved wrong.
He hated humanity and was the kind of “environmentalist” — I use the scare quotes to distinguish moral and legitimate environmentalism from the ignoble politicized variant of it – who saw human beings as a cancer on the planet. His leftist politics immunized him from suffering any damage to his reputation even as he was continually proven wrong; in fact he continued to receive plaudits and awards throughout his career.
Ehrlich was a biologist, but his career was marked by politicized “science.” His most famous and influential work, “The Population Bomb (1968), was full of pessimistic predictions, beginning with its opening sentences: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”
Among other things, Ehrlich predicted that, “England will not exist in the year 2000; the US would be rationing water by 1974 and food by 1980; smog in LA and New York would cause some 200,000 deaths per year,” and that Americans born after WWII wouldn’t live past 50.
Think of him as Al Gore with an academic credential: often wrong, but never in doubt.
Ehrlich made one mistake that most academics never make: he actually tested his ideas in a high-profile way in the real world. In 1980, economist Julian Simon offered a public, $10,000 bet: Ehrlich’s leftist theories said that all natural resources were going to become scarcer, and therefore more expensive. Simon was a conservative and therefore a generally (some might say cautiously) optimistic capitalist: he predicted that human ingenuity and a free market would make the price of commodities go down.
So Simon offered to let Ehrlich choose any five resources that he wanted, and Ehrlich could bet that in ten years, those would be more expensive. Ehrlich took the bait, and after insulting Simon’s simplistic ideology, chose five metals as the resources he was most certain about: chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten.
Annnnnddddd… Simon won the bet in 1990, when all five metals were cheaper.
The way Ehrlich handled his loss was straight out of the leftist handbook: he lied like crazy, insisted that his ideas were still correct, and insulted Simon’s intelligence for years afterward. Simon, enjoying his victory and happy to needle his arrogant opponent, offered to renew the bet, double or nothing, for another 10 years, on any other resource of Ehrlich’s choosing.
Ehrlich was at least smart enough to turn down that offer, and he did actually pay the bet off. Luckily for Ehrlich, though, he could easily pay the bet off, because he had just received a “genius” grant for $450K.
Because: of course he did. Despite, again, being wrong about everything!
When I was still a professor, this kind of thing drove me crazy. No matter how many times lefty theories and predictions failed, the lefties were not deterred, and persisted in their folly. There’s a conservative joke about this, which has a leftist condescending to a conservative, saying, “I know your ideas work in the real world. But do they work in theory?”
Examples abound. The lefty religion of Marxism had massive appeal before it was first put into real-world practice in the USSR in 1917. In the following century it was tried over and over again, all over the world. And failed every time, producing poverty, famine, environmental devastation, brutal police states and at least 100 million deaths.
So naturally, you can look at any course list in liberal arts departments all over the country and find hundreds of courses touting Marxism. And you can find old nitwits like Bernie Sanders and young nitwits like AOC and hundreds of politicians like them, all confidently vowing that THIS time their lefty schemes will work perfectly.
People have been fleeing socialist/communist countries for freer market countries for over a century. Productive Americans have been leaving leftist blue cities and states for red states for several decades.
And still, like Paul Ehrlich, the Dems are convinced that their theories are right.
To the day he died he never admitted any errors in his work, and if you read a legacy media obituary of him, you’ll be slogging through a miasma of covering up and intentional point missing to lionize a lefty co-religionist.
For example, the subhead of his New York Times’ obituary says, “His best-selling 1968 book, which forecast global famines, made him a leader of the environmental movement. But he faced criticism when his predictions proved premature.”
Got that? “Premature!” For 60 years he confidently predicted the opposite of what actually happened. But the NYT asks us to just give it another century or two, and he’ll be proven right.
Ehrlich was sure that even in the first world, life spans would get drastically shorter, and millions would starve. Annnnddd… we’re living longer than ever, and one of our big problems isn’t starvation, it’s obesity.
He was a huge fan of abortion, and left the door open for coerced sterilization and abortion, because he was sure that our skyrocketing birthrates would bring disaster. Annnnddddd… almost all first-world nations have a below-replacement birthrate.
It would be harder to be more wrong, more often than Paul Ehrlich was.
But the left is giving it their best shot.
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Martin Simpson 