The Population Bomb
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Peter. Michael. Are you familiar with a book called The Population Bomb? I have heard of this book. I have not heard anything else. I'm aware that there was a book from like the mid-century-ish that predicted overpopulation across the globe. Yes. The Population Bomb came out in 1968. It's written by Paul Ehrlich, who's a professor at Stanford, and it eventually sells two million copies.

My initial gut instinct, there's an academic talking about overpopulation. We are at most 10 minutes away from talking about eugenics and 20 minutes away from talking about genocide. I don't know of any other way this can go. It might take us slightly longer to get there, but that is absolutely where we're going. Oh, God. Okay. So we need to give a bit of background because as opposed to a lot of the other books that we've covered on this show, this isn't proposing a new idea. Yeah.

This isn't like, oh, 10,000 hours to play chess or whatever. This is basically crystallizing an idea that had been bouncing around the culture for literally centuries. This is like one of the oldest ideas. Right. As far as I can tell, Thomas Malthus is the first person to sort of officially propose the idea that the Earth just has a limit to how much population it can hold. Right. Like we're not going to have an Earth with 100 billion people on it.

Yeah. And population growth is exponential, right? Woman has three babies, they have three babies, they have three babies, whereas food production is linear. Right. Right. It's extremely difficult to double crop production and then double it again and double it again. Yeah. So eventually you're just going to have a mismatch between those two lines. And that means there just aren't enough resources for everybody to eat and

eat enough. Well, look, I've heard enough. It's time to do population control on poor people, right? I mean, that's all there is to it. But this is kind of the thing, right, is this idea is extremely tempting to people with the worst imaginable politics. Right. So this becomes a really important idea in eugenics before World War II. After the Second World War, you can't really say eugenics openly anymore, but you can talk about

family planning. And you can talk about, oh, you know, there might just not be enough to go around. And so we need to start asking some tough questions about who's going to get what we already have. Right. If only poor people could exercise the good judgment that we do, things would be fine. But since they cannot, we need to talk about our options. Exactly. Our incredibly violent options. This is a huge problem. And I'm willing for other people to make some sacrifices is basically the way that it gets framed.

Okay, so I'm going to send you a Time magazine cover from like peak population fears. This is actually before Paul Ehrlich's book comes out. But like this stuff was already a huge societal anxiety that he was basically reanimating. So you're going to love this. Oh, no, no.

Oh my god. Sometimes the racism in these old time covers is like a little dog whistle. And this one, it's like an air raid siren. This is just images of women of color and their babies. Yeah, there's like a topless African lady, like breastfeeding her kids. There's like a, I guess like Chinese lady with...

Her son and she looks kind of like sad. Like it's all these images of sort of like sad squalid conditions. Well, no, there is. There's actually one beautiful white family that. Yes. Where the child is holding a giant loaf of bread. Our abundance. The white family is fine. Exactly. It's like, oh, the white lady's fine. But look at all these hungry babies in the rest of the world, basically. To say the least. And the banner says.

That population explosion. So basically, like this, this is where we were in the 1960s, that this was pretty widely circulated already. But what Paul Ehrlich did was he merged the overpopulation anxieties with the environmentalist movement.

He was the first person to really make the case that to save the planet, we have to start looking at the number of people on it. Right. It sort of feeds into this sort of lefty environmentalist idea that people are the problem. Exactly. Yes. Right. So Paul Ehrlich is an entomologist. He's like an insect researcher. Oh, boy. I cannot stress enough how like how no training in this he has. Like this is not his field of demographics.

He doesn't do populations. He's literally a butterfly researcher. Oh, shit. So Paul Ehrlich comes to this through the Sierra Club.

He starts attending meetings in the Bay Area. And he actually wrote the book with his wife, Anne. But the publisher thought it wouldn't sell as well if it had a woman's name on the cover. So they took her off. And he's been the public face of this for basically the last like 40 years. Oh, man. It's getting so bleak so fast. I know. We're like five minutes in. We haven't even gotten to the book yet. Yeah.

So, okay, I'm going to send you the prologue. This is basically, this sets the tone and gives you a sense of like the kind of person Paul Ehrlich is. 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. Oh, so he means over like we lost the battle to feed all of humanity. It's done. Yeah.

It's locked in. Oh, my God. At this late date, nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate, although many lives could be saved through dramatic programs to stretch the carrying capacity of the earth by increasing food production and providing for more equitable distribution of whatever food is available.

but these programs will only provide a stay of execution unless they are accompanied by determined and successful efforts at population control. It cannot be overemphasized, however, that no changes in behavior or technology can save us unless we achieve control over the size of the human population. The birth rate must be brought into balance with the death rate or mankind will breed itself into oblivion.

We can no longer afford merely to treat the symptoms of the cancer of population growth. The cancer itself must be cut out. The cancer. The cancer must be cut out. Oh, my God. Bringing the death rate and the birth rate into balance is like...

When I hear those words, I don't know how you're not immediately thinking about mass murder. This is like his whole argument is about the fact that there's only two ways to achieve population stability, right? Which is to raise the death rate or to drop the birth rate. His overall argument is basically, look, guys, we have no choice.

Either we have to ensure mass death, right? We have to raise the death rate or we need to bring down the birth rate. So by bringing down the birth rate, we're not actually being bad people. What we're doing is we're saving the lives of everyone we would have to kill otherwise, right? It's like he gives you these two completely fake options, either mass death or population, like deranged population control policies that we will get to.

And it's like, if those are your only two options, then like, yeah, you're going to choose the birth stuff. But those aren't actually in any way the only two options. My years of studying butterflies have made me realize that

The human race is faced with an ultimatum. All right. So do you want to hear his case for this? Yeah. Yeah. Let's go. Maybe I'll be convinced. I feel like this is going to be a running theme of this podcast. He starts the book by talking about how he got radicalized on this issue when he went on a trip to India and he like went on a cab ride through India.

Through New Delhi. Oh my God, he's doing a Thomas Friedman. He's doing a Thomas Friedman. He says,

The streets seemed alive with people, people thrusting their hands through the taxi window begging, people defecating and urinating, people clinging to buses, people hurting animals, people, people, people, people. I mean, he's just witnessing poverty. Yes. In another culture, in a form he's maybe not accustomed to, and saying, oh my God, we've got, we have a global problem.

Exactly. This is like white dude staring out of the window of a cab disease. Right. Like he's he's universalizing all of this. And also he has no understanding of the specific dynamics of India at that time. So in in further debunkings that we will get into, people point out that, first of all, at the time, New Delhi only had a population of two point five million people. Paris had a population of eight million at the time.

So like this has nothing to do with the number of people, right? It's about like the infrastructure that's available, the levels of poverty, et cetera. And also India was just coming out of the India-Pakistan war at the time. So he also goes to like these remote areas in Kashmir where there's all this like what he calls environmental damage. But it's like it's the aftermath of a war. It's the aftermath of like a man-made conflict. Right.

that he is then describing as like, well, there's just too many people. So what year is that when he's in New Delhi? I think it was 66 when he was there. Okay. So, I mean, I was just, I was sort of thinking, how long after a famine that the British intentionally caused are we? And the answer is about 20 years. This is basically the first prong of his argument. So the argument of the entire book is three, he has three main arguments. So,

So the first is just that, like, there's too many people in the world. There's nothing really to debunk here. He does – I'm sure you've seen these things, too, where they talk about, like, the doubling times of humanity. Yeah, yeah. Up until the year 1600 or something, the doubling time was, like, every thousand years or so.

Right.

There will be about 60 million billion people on the face of the Earth. That is about 100 persons for every square yard of the Earth's surface, land and sea. And then he says it would take only about 50 years to populate Venus, Mercury, Mars, the moon and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn to the same population density as Earth.

All right. You don't understand his work with butterflies, Michael. You've got to really dig in to understand. I do like that he's proactively thinking about solutions. He's like, even if we populate the moons of Jupiter, we still have a problem. So don't even fucking talk to me. Don't fucking talk to me about populating the moons of Jupiter. I know you're going to say it, but don't say it.

I'm one step ahead of you, punk. Yeah. He also, he says like with that many people, this teeming mass of humanity, the body heat of all the people would exceed the melting point of iron. It's another big problem. Yeah. Paul. I love the image of a world where we're all physically jammed together. So like to the point where we can't move and also like it's getting really hot and it's

people are still having sex like someone like three people over from you they're fucking and you're like guys are you not learning anything like I'm I'm boiling alive over here guys we're smelting iron right now I mean look it's from you know how those like they're like honeybees that can kill kill intruders in the hive by by rubbing themselves together and and burning them up that's

That would be happening to all of humanity at once in his mind before anyone does anything or anything else goes wrong. Incredible. So basically, I mean, this is like the vision that he's setting out. And then, of course, he says that population growth is the fastest in poor countries. So after he's painted you this vision, he says, like, OK, for the world, it's like we're doubling every 35 years. But.

But then in like Kenya, it's 23 years. In Nigeria, it's 27 years. In Costa Rica, 19 years. So, of course, he immediately goes to like the poorest parts of the world. And he's like, well, they're even worse. And they're the ones that are driving this. Yeah, I guess if I had to brainstorm about like who in particular is the problem, I guess I would say them over there.

He also says that overpopulation is a problem in rich countries, specifically the United States. So he's like, overpopulation is a problem for us too. And he has like statistics about the baby boom, right? There've been this like little spike of people having babies after World War II. And then this is like very telling.

In wealthy countries, he says, overpopulation does not normally mean too many people for the area of a country, but too many people in relation to the necessities and amenities of life. Overpopulation occurs when numbers threaten values. So he's basically saying in the developing world, it's like population. It's raw numbers, right? Nigeria is doubling its population. Fine. But then in rich countries, what he means by overpopulation is that too many people would threaten the standard of life.

Which is like a completely different claim. Right. The vibes are off, right? There's a lot of people around and it's really throwing the vibes off. He complains a lot about traffic in this book.

Traffic and parking and stuff? I love this because the interstates have been up and running for like five years in this situation, and he's already complaining. It's also really telling to me that he's writing this in the late 60s, which is like peak white flight times, right? Yeah. So he also has this whole thing about urbanization and about how the real problem is like people are crowding into cities.

And he just repeats like white flight, like crime is rising and social unrest. And like you can't even go to a restaurant without waiting in line anymore, which is all just like crypto racist. Like, oh, they're all filling up with people I don't like looking at or I don't like sharing space with. So we're looking at, again, a bifurcated complaint. One, we're going to reproduce so much that we all hit a literal boiling point and explode. Yes. Two, there's fucking poor people everywhere, man.

I know. He's like, first of all, we can't go to Venus. Second of all, traffic? It's unbelievable these days. I know. He talks about how you can't even take weekend trips to Yosemite anymore because it takes too long to get out of the city. I'm like, Paul, this is what you're complaining about in your book about how we're all going to die? Okay. But he

But he also, I think this is like a very depressing detour that the environmental movement took in America in the 1970s. There's a really telling sentence in this section where he says, he's talking about urbanization and how cities are so bad. And he says, adding more people to an area increases the damage done by each individual. Is that right? It's exactly the opposite. Yeah. The more people in a city, the more you all share resources. Right. So like,

One meter of a power line serves many more people in a city. One meter of like water infrastructure. People tend to live in smaller spaces when they live in cities so they don't heat and cool a larger area like a bunch of empty rooms all year. You don't drive if you live in a city. You can look up the carbon footprint of people in suburbs and exurbs versus people in cities. It's like three to four times higher. The thing that is bad is sprawl.

Right. Literally, the more people live in skyscrapers, the more nature you can preserve. Maybe it's because he's talking about an implied alternative, not where there's more sprawl, but where there are fewer people. Right. Yes. That's the world he's sort of asking you to envision implicitly. Right. Imagine not that half of New York was out in the suburbs, but that half of New York was

Right, exactly. The vision he's laying out is one where there's just far fewer people on the planet. So when he's writing this, the global population is around 2.5 billion. And at one point, he just sort of throws out that like 1 billion is enough.

And because we're already over this fake limit that he set up, the priority now has to be on reducing the number of people, not improving the living standards of people who are already here. Any treats received by poor people will simply be turned into more babies. Right. Right.

I mean, that sort of brings us to the next argument, which is that we're not producing enough food for all of this reproduction. So he basically says that like rich countries started transferring food to poor countries pretty soon after World War II, you know, food aid programs, etc. Already countries like India aren't producing enough for their populations. He also, I want to be very clear with this because he says throughout the book, actually a lot of stuff that I agree with and a lot of stuff that is like normal left-wing stuff.

So one thing he says in this section is he says, the United States has supported an unhappy status quo throughout the third world. We've backed a series of dictators and oligarchs in numerous countries under a phony banner of anti-communism. By open and covert action, we have prevented land reform and other sociopolitical changes which are needed before reasonable agricultural development can occur. Bay Sterlik, preach, brother. I know.

Paul Ehrlich, we stan. Eco-fascist king. But he's basically – I mean I think it's important to note that like this book is very much coming from the left. Yeah. Like this is not a guy who identifies as a conservative. He's someone who's been really active in the environmental movement. Right. There's like lots of stuff in this book about how like corporations are bad and how US imperialism is bad. Like there's actually a lot of stuff here that is like true and right and agreeable.

But he's just using it to come to the most deranged conclusions and like not realizing the like crypto fascist agenda that he's actually proposing and like trying to convince you of. Oh, God, it's horseshoe theory. It's 100 percent. It's like the original horseshoe book. Yeah. So right after he says like, oh, we you know, we've been mean to the third world and like we've installed dictatorships, et cetera. He then talks about how because there's not enough food, there's going to start to be all these like mass starvation events, right?

Oh, God.

Oh, God. Oh, no. Oh, no.

I know. This is the other thing where he's setting up like, oh, I guess you want to kill all the dogs and cats, huh? And you're like, what, Paul? I love that we're like, he's envisioned a situation where we are staving off global hunger by like shipping cat meat abroad. Exactly. Exactly.

Do you know what would happen before we get to that point, Paul? I know. Like, walk me through the steps, Paul. How do we get to me killing my cat and sending it to Cambodia? Please. Presumably at the government's direction, right? Like a fed is knocking on your door like hand over patches. So the first two arguments are like there's too many people. There's not enough food. And then his third argument for this is that like too many people are already destroying the environment.

So, easily a third of the book is just him filibustering about environmental damage. He talks about polluted rivers. He talks about, like, a lot of stuff about pesticides. He talks about this – there's this long-running campaign in Arizona to try to kill fire ants.

And like they were going to dust 20 million square acres of Arizona with this like pesticide and then people sued and blah, blah, blah. And it's like, OK, but like what does this have to do with population, Paul? Yeah. He wants you to infer –

Yes. That because pesticides are bad, we need to do something about population control rather than perhaps like the very specific subset of people who are doing the pesticide. And these are not problems in the developing world either. Right. He's talking about pesticides that are being overused in America. And it's like, well, we can just not do that in America then. Right.

Like that really doesn't have anything to do with what's going on in the rest of the world. And he never really justifies why this is like inevitable if there's more people. Right, right. Which, you know, look, I get it. If I were ever to write a book, I guarantee you a good chunk of it is just going to be me talking about shit I feel like talking about. Okay, so another thing that I feel like has kind of been lost to time, because this is like a famous book and famous books, like nobody ever reads famous books, right? They just get the like Reader's Digest version. And so at least a quarter...

Oh, my fucking God. Oh, my fucking God. It's like...

It's like, what are you doing, dude? And then he spends like 25 pages walking through this thing where there's like a global pandemic. What an idiot. That'll never happen. I know. I know.

All right. Paul's like one for two on that. Fine. And then, okay. But then he does this fucked up bait and switch. So the final scenario, he's walking us through like these two nightmarish scenarios of like everything going wrong. The third scenario is like looking back from the future on like what we did right. And it's describing like all these like UN convenings of like the countries coming together in

And like everyone loves it. He talks – he has this fake quote from like the future premier of China saying like Russia and America are our friends because they gave us all this like food and tractors and pesticides starting in the 1960s. Like thanks, America. Yeah.

It's all this kumbaya shit. So I'm reading this and I'm like, okay, so like maybe it's not so bad. Like it sounded quite reactionary and terrible. But like, okay, he's proposing more participatory systems where like poor countries and rich countries can come together. A more cooperative world. Yeah. Maybe Paul's not so bad.

And then we get to the next chapter where he talks about like his actual proposals. Oh, God. So, of course, because he's bifurcating this problem without actually admitting that that's what he's doing, he starts off by talking about how we need to reduce population growth in the U.S., right?

He floats the idea, but doesn't totally commit to it, of adding sterilence to the water supply. But the thing is, he's too chicken shit to actually propose it. He says, many of my colleagues feel...

that some sort of compulsory birth regulation would be necessary to achieve birth control. Oh, man, he's doing he's doing a Trump. Many people are saying it for sterilizing the entire population. And then I fucking love this. So then he's like, but that would never work, obviously. And then he sort of debunks it like, well, that's not a real plan. But then he says all of his objections to the plan are like on technical grounds. Right. While well-meaning, the plan to sterilize every human being in the country

It's logistically infeasible. Exactly. He's like, well, we don't have a substance that could sterilize both men and women. And then he's also worried that it might affect the drinking water of livestock. Let's make sure that our livestock are getting the good water that doesn't sterilize you while the human beings drink from the murder water.

But so it's like, it's the most deranged thing where he proposes this like fully like genocidal idea, right? Like let's sterilize everybody. And he's like, it would never work. You're like, well, there's really other reasons not to do it, actually. Like I can think of a few. I'm imagining just sort of like longingly looking at a cow drinking water across a field and being like, oh, he's getting the good stuff. Buying cow water at 7-Eleven. Yeah.

The black market for the sterilization-free water. But then because he's too chicken shit to like actually commit to the obvious conclusions of his own idea, he basically spends the rest of the chapter like talking about America. You know, his proposals for America are all like stupid.

super low grade, easy stuff. So he's like, oh, we should cut welfare benefits for people who like have more than three kids, which is like an unbelievably bad idea. But it's like a pretty bog standard Republican idea. He even names that this has like been proposed in a bill that like you lose your child tax credits after three kids. I mean, look, three kids is to the that's to the left of the modern Republican Party. He wants responsibility prizes for couples that

Oh, my God. Okay. Little pat on the back from Paul. That's right. Pay up. Yeah.

Yeah. Sending your Venmo request to the government with just like three question marks after a long night. But then, I mean, he also it's like normal stuff. He also says like there should be higher taxes on corporations. We should make corporations clean up their pollution spills. Like there's, again, a bunch of like filibustery environmental stuff.

Which is like, yeah, we should do all that. I love that he has, in the prescriptive phase, gotten weirdly neoliberal with these little ticky-tack solutions. He's like, what if we incentivized certain people to engage in less sexual activity or whatever? Yeah.

When the diagnosis was we're all going to reproduce so much that we literally explode. Yes. Right. The mismatch is fucking wild. It's like you're like, what about a gas tax, Paul? And he's like, hey, let's not get carried away. Let's not do anything drastic in America. All right. Tone it down. But then, OK, then we get to the section where he talks about what we need to do internationally. Right.

So he uses the metaphor of triage, like hospital triage. Do you know how this works? I'm really embarrassed to say no, but that's the truth. It's a term that I've heard and a term that I have used, and I definitely only learned what it is this week. That makes me feel better. So the idea is when there's like a big earthquake or some sort of major event, there's like hundreds of people coming into the ER, right?

Hospitals do this thing where it's like you split people into three groups. There's people who are going to die regardless of what you do for them, right? Like really grievous injuries. And then there's people who are going to live regardless of what you do for them, like people who have like a sprained ankle or something.

And then there's people who like they will live if they get treatment and they will die if they don't get treatment. Right. And so when a hospital goes to triage mode, they focus exclusively on those people and like anyone else just like doesn't get seen. That's the idea, right? It's a way of prioritizing. Right. So the first step of this plan for the world is splitting countries into these categories. Oh, no.

I know. So there's basically countries that are like fine. And then there's countries that are going to have starvation so profound that they're not going to be able to make it because their populations are growing too fast. Also, nothing we can do for them. And then there's the group in the middle of countries that we need to actually like help.

So all of our international efforts now should be at identifying countries in those three categories. That's going to be a high stakes UN vote. I'll tell you that. And then he's not specific about who decides which countries are in these categories. Right. I mean, even in a triage, like a hospital situation, it's a huge judgment call. Like, is this person going to die with this injury or not? And it's even more complicated when it comes to countries. He's not clear about that. He specifically rejects

The idea of using the UN to do this because he's like the UN has like, you know, the poor countries are like members of the UN and like they might not like this. Unfortunately, the countries will be voting in their own interests and we cannot have that. Unfortunately, they don't like when we decide their fate. So we need to like set up a club of the other. He's like, oh, we need to get a club with like Australia, the UK, Germany, whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Let's just just naming some countries off the top of my head.

For example, U.S., U.K., Germany, France, Australia. I'm just just randomly selecting from my mind space. So this program, after we split the countries into three groups, the first thing is like all this propaganda in foreign countries. So he wants to send like TVs to rural areas of poor countries to like tell them not to have babies. Right.

Oh, God.

What the fuck? So it's like, have you tried being less poor? We should tell people in poor countries that they should try not being poor anymore. I'm going to go to Nigeria and start talking about grind set. Let's talk about hustle, folks. Let's talk about waking up, rising and grinding every day. We're shipping live, laugh, love posters to...

To all homes in the developing world. The shipping TVs thing is phenomenal because you know that his first thought was like, well, we need to send propaganda. And he's like, okay, what's propaganda? It's like stuff you do on TV. Okay, well, they might not have TVs. So let's ship them the TVs first. Perfect.

Beautiful mind shit. This guy is just a dynamic problem solver. Also, electricity famously available in rural areas of developing countries in the 1960s. Sending utility companies to Africa. Yeah, exactly. Perfect.

He also has this whole dumb thing where he wants to send crops, like better, more productive crops to these populations. So alongside the propaganda, you send them like more productive seeds. But then he clearly understands that this is totally deranged because he says –

Improved strains of various crops developed elsewhere might not grow satisfactorily or might be unacceptable to the local people as food. Yeah, Paul, you can't just like send people in rural China like here's this crop that you have no history with. You don't know how to grow. You don't know how to prepare. Well, yeah, but if they watch the television show that explains how to grow it. Yeah.

It's so funny to me that he like immediately devolves into this dorm room level shit. I know. When he's trying to solve the problem. So he also, I've been saving the most deranged shit. He says at the, toward the end of this chapter, he says the bedrock requirement of the program would have to be population control necessarily including migration control to prevent swamping of aided areas by the less fortunate. Yeah.

Ugh.

The honest way to talk about this stuff would be to say, look, you and I, the reader, need to make hard choices about what our future looks like and what we're going to do to ensure that the globe is habitable in the next 50 years. But the way he's talking about it is like you and I are going to need to knock our heads together and

And think about which Indians deserve to die and which deserve to live. I know. I know. And also, he doesn't seem to understand the profundity of what he's proposing here. It's like, so, Paul, you are proposing that a foreign country, the United States, split India into new political units according to who we think deserves to live or die. And then we are also setting up migration controls here.

within another country to keep people from moving from one part of their own country to another. To be fair, at this point, they're only like 50 years out from the West chopping up the Middle East as it deemed fit. I mean, that's the thing. It's consistent, at least. You know, it's the 60s and maybe he's looking... Maybe back then they looked at the Middle East and they were like,

That wasn't so bad. Yeah, that went well. All those straight lines on a map is a really good sign. Let's do that more. Right. I mean, how many countries restrict the internal movement of their own populations? It's very few and they're not like countries that we're in a lot of clubs with. Yeah. You know, if someone brought this to you, to like any given population, the only thing you can do is immediately prepare for war. Right. Yes.

Yes. It's the logical thing to do. And also, I mean, I am fascinated by this, that someone who considers himself a liberal, right, someone who knows enough about world politics to be like, yeah, we've installed some dictators and like that's bad and like everyone deserves freedom and equality is somehow talking himself into this like – I mean, this is worse than colonialism, right? Do you know how hard it is to make the world order worse than it currently is? Yeah.

Paul's like, hold my beer. Let's do this. But it's just like you read this book and you just sort of like that thing about, oh, you know, we might have to throw in some migration controls and like some areas of India and others. And you're like, these are not like footnotes, Paul. These are like really, really huge things that you're proposing that are like totally unprecedented and awful. And you're somehow talking yourself into like, well, you know,

Yeah, right. Yeah, you know, I mean...

I wonder how much of it is purely selfish versus knowing that you can't pitch actual sacrifice to America in a book. Right.

Like you can't you're not going to sell a book that's like we all need to purposefully make our lives significantly worse. Right. Or else there will be consequences. What you can do is say, what if we tinkered with the neoliberal order a bit stateside and over there we instituted a brutal global regime attack?

Right, right.

He's like, oh, it would never work here. Like we could never do it. Yeah. He has a forward by this guy that works at the Sierra Club. And he says, people are recognizing that we cannot forever continue to multiply and subdue the earth without losing our standard of life and the natural beauty that must be part of it. He's putting these aesthetic concerns. Right. Front and center. Like for him, it's about his standard of life. It's about him getting to visit fucking Yosemite on the weekends.

It's so telling that he keeps mentioning these like little inconveniences of daily life as a middle-aged guy in the Bay Area in the 1960s. Because it's like this is what he's actually interested in. His life has gotten a little bit more annoying and like cities are getting more crowded, harder to park. And he's blown this up into like this national issue. That's what's driving all of this.

Right. I mean, and that's the heart of reactionary politics. Right. And you can see it in modern discourse, too, where there's like.

They can dress it up in rhetoric that is often expressly left wing, if not just sort of gesturing toward left wing ideals. When you start peeling back the onion, what you start to find is petty grievance and, you know, grievance that amounts to I want to continue to live my life in the exact same way I was living it before, completely unfettered.

That's what I see here, right, is this the dressing up of these weird reactionary complaints about daily life in cities and shit like that as like this global issue. Imagine imagine what your life will be like if we continue to let the population to expand and what he wants you to envision is a world where things are slightly more annoying. Right.

Right. That to me is why, you know, I think you're right. He's deploying a lot of left wing rhetoric. But this is not just reactionary in places. This is like fundamentally reactionary. This is like the essence of reaction. Exactly. And also, I mean, this little I'm so stuck on this phrase. You know, he says, you know, we can't continue to multiply without losing our standard of living and natural beauty. And it's like, but what about the standard of living for people who live in India? Right.

Like you want them to eat different food, totally change their way of life. And also parts of India are pretty beautiful too. Like there's natural beauty outside of the United States, my dude. Look, if I have to pay 30% more for diapers and 2 billion people on the other side of the planet have to die for me to continue to go on really nice drives, we're in this together. So, I mean, that's the book. He also, he does some like...

forced sterilization stuff. Yeah, naturally. He says that like we should send helicopters and like trained medical professionals. And the funny thing is like that's so fucking odious, but it's like the fourth most odious thing in the book. Right. By the time he gets the forced sterilization, you're like, oh, okay, we've already covered like supranational institutions. Right.

Did this lead to any actual genocides? I'm going to be so mad. Oh, dude. I mean, this led to, I mean, you can never draw a straight line between, you know, a book and an outcome, right? But like forced sterilization policies were very common. Like India had a like decade long program. This also led to the one child policy in China. Okay.

Jesus Christ. You can't say this book completely, but like the panic over overpopulation. Right. There was a point where Bangladesh was spending 60% of its own public health budget on population control efforts. What the fuck? A lot of poor countries got roped into this because, I mean, first of all, they have inequalities in poor countries. And a lot of poor countries were run by like really nasty dictators at the time. And they loved this shit because they're like, this is the way that I can crack down on minority populations. So, yeah.

There was a forced sterilization program in Peru by Fujimori that sterilized 290,000 women, 270,000 of which were indigenous women. It's like, what a great way to find this population that threatens your power that you don't like anyway. And you're like, oh, let's just make sure they can't have babies anymore. And the U.S., there's actually quite a bit of debate of like how much the U.S. knew. But like the U.S. didn't really step in to stop this and didn't step in to make sure this wasn't happening.

The World Health Organization was really big on population control. And a lot of times countries would tie their food aid and their financial aid to population control measures. So you can't get the shipment of food unless you put in place these policies. And so...

It sort of ends up having these effects where we're like imposing ideology on these poor countries. But it's never called that. It's never like, oh, like we're actually going to make you do this. It's like, well, this is actually just the best thing. Like science says that this is good for you. So we just think you should do the good thing.

The discourse about aid to other countries, right, that you'll see coming from like the right where they'll say, you know, we should be helping people at home before we ship out money to other countries. Not that they actually believe that. But even if you take it at face value, it's like, you know, we're not really trying to help them, right? Like, you know, that money is being used to secure U.S. interests across the globe. Right. Like, I promise you, we're not giving it to them for free in any meaningful sense.

There's also, oh my God, have you ever heard of zero population growth? No. This is another like really gross thing. So the book comes out in 1968 and basically makes no splash at all. Nobody gives a shit until 1970 when the author, Paul Ehrlich, is on The Tonight Show. Okay. Absolutely.

After his appearance on The Tonight Show, the book ends up selling 2 million copies and Johnny Carson has Paul Ehrlich on 20 more times. Paul Ehrlich on one of these Tonight Show appearances mentions that like, oh, we need a grassroots effort to like control population. So he starts or somebody starts this thing called zero population growth that became a really big movement on college campuses in the 1970s.

And then, I mean, this is like the least twistiest twist ever. It ends up becoming really reactionary. So within a couple of years, they're calling for the U.S. to reduce immigration by 90 percent. They're like, oh, population. Yeah, of course. Unfortunately. And then it breaks off this like immigration control committee something something of this group breaks off and becomes fascist.

FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which is this infamous right-wing nightmare organization. Oh my God. One of the most, how would I put it? Well, let's just say one of the most visible anti-Muslim organizations in the country. Exactly. So that grows out immediately. That's like a little tumor that grows inside of ZPG and then breaks off and becomes its own reactionary movement. So it's like, yeah, Paul...

This was like really, really predictable. And of course, like right wing millionaires. Yeah. The guy who runs the company, you know, the mixed Dixie cups. Okay. He's like a right wing asshole. And he put a bunch of full page ads in like the New York Times saying like we have to control. He loved Paul Ehrlich. This guy who's fucking tiny cups are littering the bottom of our ocean. Exactly. Exactly.

It's full of complaints about overpopulation. All right. So it's now 2022. None of the things that he predicted have happened. Birth rates were already flat and falling in Asia by the time he wrote this. They now say the next doubling time for the human population is going to be 100 to 175 years. We will not reach the melting point of iron in our lifetimes. Unfortunately not. That would that would have been cool to see the having sex while melting. Twitter would have been fucking crazy that week. Yeah.

So birth rates have flattened out basically because economic growth. And then also crop yields have outpaced population growth every single year. Something that like that he never gets into in his book that drives me nuts is that he never acknowledges the fact that we even knew then that famine...

Famines are political. There's no such thing as a famine that is caused by like not enough rainfall. Right. Kansas has years where there's not enough rainfall for crops and like people do not starve in Kansas. It's about trade and consumption and like political systems. Right. It's not the 1300s. Right. I mean, like the world is connected enough that if there is massive starvation in one place, it is at least to some degree because another place is not sending them food.

Exactly. And also, I mean, if you look at the numbers, the charts are really stark. Like when he was writing his book,

Between 12 and 15 million people every year died in famines. And now it's 75,000 people a year. That's a month of COVID in America. Exactly. I know. The reason that he's saying this will happen is just an overall global shortage of food, right? Yes. That's extremely different from localized shortages of food. So Paul Ehrlich is still alive. Oh, shit. He's been proven wrong on like all of the central claims of his book. And he just like

won't backtrack. He wrote a book in 1990 called The Population Explosion. Hell yeah. And then in 2018, he was interviewed and they're like, do you regret anything? And he's like, yes, I didn't make dire enough predictions. It's really bad out there. This is how you know he's a conservative.

Just proven wrong. And people are like, so obviously you're wrong. And he's like, don't agree, buddy. Don't agree. Don't agree. You know what? And to remind our listeners, he predicted hundreds of millions of deaths, right? In the 70s and 80s. Yeah. At one point, he predicted major famines in the United States as well. So I imagine his current defense is something like, look, the exact numbers were off, but the vibes were right. I mean, because nobody reads these fucking books that go viral back in the day.

So he says, oh, well, look, I didn't really make any predictions in that book. All I was saying is that the earth has a limit to how many people it can feed. Like that's his line now. And it's like, no, dude, you said that a billion was the number of people that the earth should have. You said that we had exceeded the limit. Right. Like the fact that there is a limit is totally banal. Nobody disagrees with that. Right. And so I want to end with a quote about the reason why this idea keeps coming up.

Because as soon as you start Googling around, like type in overpopulation, you start finding exactly these arguments getting resurrected again as like climate change stuff. You find this in Jeffrey Sachs' book, The End of Poverty. You find it in like Gates Foundation documents. There was an interview last fall with Jane Goodall.

where she was like, you know, it might be time to start asking some tough questions about overpopulation. Like this idea will not die. And I found a really fascinating article called Barbarian Hordes, the Overpopulation Scapegoat in International Development Discourse that basically tracks every single resurgence of this idea and basically tries to talk about it as like a psychological phenomenon. Like why do we keep returning to this argument?

It says,

I think that's right. And, you know, I sort of have come to understand reactionary impulses more as psychological phenomena rather than purely ideological manifestations. Right. To me, all of this runs very parallel to how

conservatives talk about poor people in the United States and plenty of liberals, frankly, talk about poor people in the United States, right? Where they are naturally searching for reasons to blame poor people for their own situation. Right. You need to put it on them in some way.

so that the moral onus is off you. Right. One of the things that bugs me so much about this discourse coming up again is always packaged as like it's time to ask tough questions about overpopulation. And it's the least tough question imaginable because it doesn't actually challenge anybody in power, right? If the actual problem, as Paul Ehrlich says in his book a million times, is DuPont pouring chemicals into rivers, right?

then like the question is, why are we allowing a company to do that? If the problem is carbon pouring into the atmosphere, why are we doing that? But it's not actually a tough question to ask

Are poor people having too many babies? Are people who aren't me responsible for their own conditions? That's not a tough question. That's a really easy question. And that's why we keep asking it. Right. There's no there's no moral judgment of the West inherent in it. Right. And the irony is that the policy solution proposed by Ehrlich is.

It's much more onerous, right? Yeah. You know, on one hand, it's like, well, what do we want to do? Do we want to pass a regulation saying DuPont can't pour those chemicals in the pond? No, let's seize sovereignty from South Asian countries all at once, divvy them up and tell them exactly when and where they can breathe. It's time to do the easy stuff. You know, the real tragedy here is that at the time this book came out, there wasn't like a hit piece apparatus that

Because if this came out now, there'd be some New Yorker piece called, like, the butterfly dipshit. And then, you know, if someone brought this up at a party, they were like, hey, have you heard about this Ehrlich guy's book? You'd be like, you mean the butterfly dipshit? And what can you say to that? You know, the conversation's over.