where it might cause “deterioration of our environment.”) His book was a huge hit, selling over two million copies, and Ehrlich appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Simon, a ferocious libertarian optimist, took umbrage and spent the next decade writing articles, think-tank studies, and academic papers countering Ehrlich’s furious Malthusian pessimism. (Another difference between the two – and you may have guessed it – Ehrlich had one child, Simon had three.) In his 1798 book, An Essay on the Principle of Population , Thomas Malthus argued that, “Population, when unchecked... increases in a geometrical ratio [while] means of subsistence... could not possibly be made to increase faster than in an arithmetical ratio.” In other words, there’s no end to the number of babies that can be made, but you can only plant so much wheat before you run the plow into the side of the house. It was a brilliantly self-evident idea that left a number of 19th century cutting-edge thinkers – John Stuart Mill, David Ricardo, Charles Darwin – smacking themselves on the forehead for not seeing it first. But, like many brilliantly self-evident ideas (free love, New Coke, GE Capital), it wasn’t so brilliant. TEAM EHRLICH People are a dead loss – except too many of them are alive.
was in business economics, and he owned a successful mail-order and advertising company. Ehrlich taught biology at Stanford. Simon taught economics and business administration at the University of Illinois and the University of Maryland. So what we have here is not a quarrel between specialists with their narrow viewpoints, but an intellectual argument... a fight about ideas. And – as the motto of this magazine says – ideas matter. Ehrlich started it with his 1968 book The Population Bomb . As if the title isn’t panicky enough, the opening sentences read: The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate... Well, that didn’t happen. But unfortunately, it isn’t just good ideas that matter. Bad ideas matter, too. And Ehrlich’s idea was not only to raise an alarm, but to put forth some alarming ideas of his own – such as a “Department of Population and Environment,” which “should be set up with the power to take whatever steps are necessary to establish a reasonable population size in the United States and to put an end to the steady deterioration of our environment.” (Imagine a “Penis Security Administration,” or “PSA,” sending you through body scanners while you have sex to make sure you’re using a condom and aren’t doing it outdoors
American Consequences 39
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