Paul Ehrlich - Good Riddance

Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, died last Friday, March 13, 2026. His ideas of a world population growing too large for the carrying capacity of the Earth had been disproved before he was born. The Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus had made similar predictions in his 1798 publication, An Essay on the Principle of Population. But even at the time Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, demographers already knew its basic premise was false: fertility rates had already significantly declined in Western countries, and, as Steven Hayward notes:

As it happened, Ehrlich’s book appeared right at the peak year for world fertility, which has been falling precipitously ever since. Now the most pressing population problem is that fertility rates have fallen so fast that in a century or less from now, falling global population may be one of humanity’s most pressing problems. (For example, if South Korea’s fertility rate, already far below replacement level, keeps falling, the last South Korean will be born about 30 years from now.)

But Ehrlich's ideas--memes in the truest sense of the word--were swallowed hook, line, and sinker by policy wonks and elites. As Noah Rothman discusses at the National Review, Ehrlich convinced many in the West to forego having children, and informed government programs to sterilize women:

“The large number of sterilizations began in earnest in 1966, when Medicaid came into existence and funded the operation for low-income people,” the author Angela Franks wrote. Indeed, by 1977, “up to one-quarter” of Native American women had undergone sterilization, she wrote. A program of “voluntary” sterilization of Puerto Rican women in the 1960s unfolded similarly. By 1965, about one-third of Puerto Rican women surveyed admitted to undergoing a sterilization procedure amid the efforts of the U.S. government and the International Planned Parenthood Federation to promote the practice. 

The sterilization programs are still used to beat white Americans about the head as if it were our fault instead of representing the policies of the liberals in government. For instance, the Navajo detective series Dark Winds, produced by George R.R. Martin and, until his death, Robert Redford, repeatedly bring up the practice to guilt the audience.