To note the recent death of Paul Ehrlich, it seemed appropriate to reference Apeman, a song from The Kinks 1970 album Lola Versus Powerman and the Money Go Round, Part One (for my ridiculously compulsive exploration of a little known period in The Kinks discography read Kinkdom). It was the lyrics in the first two verses that made me think of Ehrlich and gave me an excuse to show the band playing the entire song.
I think I'm sophisticated 'Cause I'm living my life Like a good homo sapiens But all around me Everybody's multiplying And they're walking round like flies, man So I'm no better than the animals Sitting in the cages in the zoo, man 'Cause compared to the flowers And the birds and the trees I am an apeman
I think I'm so educated And I'm so civilized 'Cause I'm a strict vegetarian And with the over population And inflation and starvation And the crazy politicians I don't feel safe in this world no more I don't want to die in a nuclear war I want to sail away to a distant shore And make like an apeman
The Population Bomb, Ehrlich's enormous best seller, was published in 1968, a book in which he predicted mass famine by the end of the 1970s and global environmental deterioration. He had a distinguished academic career at Stanford University and received countless awards and recognition over the decades for his work.
The problem is that Ehrlich was wrong, incredibly wrong, but it never seemed to impair his academic credibility. I read The Population Bomb during my freshman year of college (1969-70) and, in my naivete, was impressed with his thesis, though even at the time, found some of his language overwrought. By the end of the 70s it was clear to me Ehrlich was wrong and became baffled by the continuing respect accorded him and those who adopted his views.
The most dramatic evidence of Ehrlich's wrongness was his 1980 bet with economist Julian Simon, summarized by Wikipedia:
The economist Julian Simon
argued in 1980 that overpopulation is not a problem as such and that
humanity will adapt to changing conditions. Simon argued that eventually
human creativity will improve living standards, and that most resources
were replaceable.[50] Simon stated that over hundreds of years, the prices of virtually all commodities had decreased significantly and persistently.[51]
Ehrlich termed Simon the proponent of a "space-age cargo cult" of
economists convinced that human creativity and ingenuity would create
substitutes for scarce resources and reasserted the idea that population
growth was outstripping the Earth's supplies of food, fresh water and
minerals.[8]
This exchange resulted in the Simon–Ehrlich wager, a bet about the trend of prices for resources during a ten-year period that was made with Simon in 1980.[8]
Ehrlich was allowed to choose ten commodities that he predicted would
become scarce and thus increase in price. Ehrlich chose mostly metals,
and lost the bet, as their average price decreased by about 30% in the
next 10 years.
Ehrlich's prognostication failings reminds me of the quote attributed to Nobel Prize winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli after reviewing the paper of a young physicist, "That is not only not right, it is not even wrong".
I never met Ehrlich but did have the opportunity to sit with one of his acolytes (they'd co-authored papers and was involved in setting up the Ehrlich-Simon bet), Paul Holdren, at a small dinner in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2008. Like his mentor, Holdren has had a distinguished academic career with positions at Harvard and Berkeley and receiving a MacArthur Foundation "genius" Fellowship. In 2009, President Obama appointed Holdren as his chief science advisor and director of the White House's Office of Science & Technology, a role he served in both of Obama's administrations.
While I don't remember most of the details of the dinner discussion, my overall impression was Holdren fit the pattern found in Harvard academics in encounters during my twelve years working in Cambridge and, for a decade after, being a frequent visitor; they tended to be close-minded, provincial, and intolerant of dissenting opinions, not something I would have predicted when I began working in the city in 1980. Most found it incomprehensible that anyone would disagree with their political opinions or general thoughts on the world out of anything other than ignorance and/or bigotry, and automatically devalued the views of anyone lacking the "right" credentials.
In the wake of Ehrlich's death I came across a tweet he'd sent on January 3, 2023 after a 60 Minutes appearance, which explains how he and Holdren maintained their academic reputations. It is quite an indictment of academia:
"60 Minutes extinction story has brought the usual right-wing out in force. If I'm always wrong so is science, since my work is always peer-reviewed, including the POPULATION BOMB and I've gotten virtually every scientific honor."
Notice one of the tactics he, and many other academics, employs is to call any criticism "right-wing" thus casting those criticizing him into the outer darkness where the substance of the criticism can be completely disregarded. The funny thing is I came across the quote in a tweet from Roger Pielke Jr, a traditional liberal and critic of Ehrlich. Pielke wrote a longer piece, Gravediggers of Science, on Ehrlich in his substack, relating his encounter with Ehrlich in 2010, in which Ehrlich and the scurrilous climate scientist Michael Mann engaged in their favorite smearing tactic and making completely false allegations.
Ehrlich and others employ these tactics because in the circles they swim in it works. There is no price to pay for being wrong or for trying to destroy others with false innuendo and worse. In fact, they are rewarded for doing so.
Rereading The Population Bomb and some of Ehrlich's other work one is struck by what a miserable and misanthropic view of humanity he holds.(1) It probably explains his desire of widespread sterilization and a powerful world government to enforce his views.
I'll give the last word to this summary from The Free Press. They are unfortunately correct that his worldview has infected society:
Imagine
getting almost everything wrong and still transforming the world with
your ideas. That, more or less, is what happened to economist and
professional eco-pessimist PaulEhrlich, who died this week at 93. Ehrlich shot to fame in 1968 with his bestseller The Population Bomb. It predicted an explosion in humankind, draining the planet’s resources and triggering a near apocalypse.
Thankfully, Ehrlich would be proven wrong—stunningly wrong—by events. But even if Ehrlich lost the argument, his Malthusian mindset still won him award after award and, in many ways, became conventional wisdom.
Today, we’re bringing you two pieces on Ehrlich’s ideas and why they matter.
Up first, the British science writer Matt Ridley details the callous policy proposals Ehrlich’s thinking led him to support—including forced sterilization programs that Ehrlich called “coercion in a good cause”—and the policymakers who listened to him.
Up next, Larissa Phillips. She was born to parents beholden to Ehrlich’s theories. In fact, she says, she almost wasn’t
born because of them: Her parents were trying to model their own family
planning on his prescription for zero population growth. Thankfully,
they didn’t quite get it right. Ehrlich’s
death caused Larissa to contemplate not just the impact of his ideas on
her family but also where the line falls—where idealism becomes
pretentious, or pessimistic, or harmful.
(1) In that regard, Ehrlich reminds me of the leaders of the
AI crowd. Though Ehrlich preached scarcity and the AI dudes abundance,
at heart they are all anti-humanists. If AI can perform better than
humans, of what use are people? The AI leaders have clearly said this
and don't care about the implications. In February 2025 I summarized
Elon Musk's worldview but it can be said for all of the AI proponents:
Musk and a small group of "creatives" run society, with robots operating
our factories, and AI, using Musk-designed algorithms, running
everything else. Enough wealth is created to fund a Universal Basic
Income for the rest of Americans, who live in a ketamine and cannabis
induced haze.
The remains of Pfc. Norton V. Retzsch, who died on New Georgia in the Solomon Islands were recently identified and will be buried on April 13 in Marana, Arizona, a town near Tucson, 83 years after his death.
Retzsch, 25 years of age and recently married, was with the 1st Marine Raider Battalion. On July 9, 1943 he and two fellow Marines were caught in a Japanese ambush and killed. It took decades after the end of WW2 to identify possible remains and have them DNA tested and compared to one of his relatives.
After Norton's death his wife, Margaret, enlisted in the Marine Corps Women's Reserve. She eventually remarried and passed in 2005.
The New Georgia campaign, from June 30 to October 7, 1943 and cost 1,195 American lives, is one of many almost forgotten battles in the U.S. effort to capture the Solomon Islands with most of the fighting occurring between August 1942 and April 1944
The search for remains of the missing continues. The difficulties in this process can be seen in the Military.com article on the search for Norton Retzsch.
After the war, the 604th Quartermaster Graves Registration Company
searched the Bairoko Harbor and Enogai Inlet area from November to
December 1947 but found no trace of Retzsch. The military declared him
non-recoverable in 1949 and inscribed his name on the Tablets of the
Missing at the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial in the Philippines.
What
the military did not know at the time was that Retzsch's remains had
likely already been recovered. In December 1943, unidentified remains
buried at the Enogai Cemetery were exhumed and transferred first to a
New Georgia cemetery, then to Finschhafen, Papua New Guinea, where they
were designated as Unknown X-182. After multiple failed identification
attempts, X-182 was interred at the Manila American Cemetery in 1950.
The
case remained dormant for decades until DPAA turned its attention back
to New Georgia. Agency researchers flagged a group of unidentified
remains from the Enogai and Bairoko area as possible matches for missing
Raiders, and in January 2019, X-182 was pulled from the Manila cemetery
and sent to the DPAA laboratory.
In 2013, I wrote of another missing Marine, Alexander "Sandy" Bonnyman, killed during the attack on Tarawa in November 1943. Bonneyman is the only Medal of Honor recipient photographed during the action for which he received the medal. In 2015, Bonnyman's remains were finally identified and he was returned home.
Nowhere is there warmth to be found Among those afraid of losing their ground Rain gray town, known for its sound In places, small faces unbound
Round the squares, huddled in storms Some laughing, some just shapeless forms
Released as a single 60 years ago this month by The Byrds. I'd never heard anything like this on AM radio before. Composed by band members Roger McGuinn, David Crosby, and Gene Clark. A very heavy song for its time, featuring the weirdest, chaotic, atonal lead guitar (inspired by Coltrane according to McGuinn) ever heard on a rock recording, peaking on the last part of the second solo.
Beyond that is Chris Hillman's pounding bass, Crosby's strong rhythm guitar, the harmonies of Clark, McGuinn and, above all, Crosby, and the finest drumming of Michael Clark's career with the group. The song is pulsating and relentless.
Between 1965 and 1968 The Byrds pioneered folk rock, introducing Dylan to a wider audience (Mr Tambourine Man), psychedelic music (Fifth Dimension), and gave many rock fans their first taste of country music (Sweetheart of the Rodeo).
1950s health care isn’t expensive; this same regimen
would be a bargain at today’s prices. What’s expensive is things that
didn’t exist in 1950. You can say that “health care” has gotten more
expensive—or you can say that the declining cost of other things has
allowed us to pour a lot more resources into exciting new health
products that give us both longer and healthier lives.
In Crisis of Abundance, I wrote,
The American middle class can still afford the wonderful
health care that was available in 1975–easily. . .as a thought
experiment, a return to 1975 health care standards would completely
resolve what is commonly described as America’s health care crisis.
My guess is that if you could find a health insurance policy today that
only covered diagnostic procedures and treatments that were available in
1958, the cost of that policy would not be much higher than it was
then. Much of the additional spending goes for MRIs and other advanced
medical equipment, as well as for health care professionals with more
extensive specialization and training than what was available 50 years
ago.
These observations get at the
distinctions between healthcare, health insurance, and health outcomes
which too easily get mashed together.
I'd like to have 1950s or 1975 healthcare costs. But I don't want 1950s or 1975 health care.
I've
been on Medicare and a supplemental plan since 2016. If I add up what
Medicare has paid since then and compare it to what I pay for Medicare
each year plus what I paid in Medicare taxes over the years, the
government is still way ahead on the deal.
It's still true, even
though a year ago today my heart stopped for a bit, I went to another
place momentarily, and ended up transported by ambulance to an ICU in
Tucson, where I spent the next two days and underwent an emergency
procedure. I was informed that most with my condition do not make it to
the hospital. I recovered quickly and completely, but the procedure I
underwent was not invented until about fifteen years ago. Prior to that
time I would have had a lengthier hospital stay and been sent home for
extended bed rest until my condition improved, while remaining at risk
the entire time, and with a much likelier outcome where, if surviving,
I'd have permanent heart damage. The drugs I would have been prescribed
also had major side effects.
Instead, the operation went well, I
was discharged in 48 hours with no permanent damage, and the new
medication for my condition, which only reached the market a decade ago,
has had no side effects.
When
I got my Medicare statement a few weeks later, the nominal "cost" for
those two days was $194,000 of which Medicare and my supplemental paid
$38,000 and I paid $16. The statement informed me that Medicare had
"saved" me $156,000. I put "cost" and "saved" in quotes because those
words have no meaning in the healthcare lingo we use today. If I go to a
car dealer and see a car with a $50,000 sticker price and the dealer
accepts my $10,000 offer, that 50K price is not real and I did not save
40K by making the purchase. Healthcare pricing is simply crazy.
The pricing may be crazy, but I'm happy to be here.
My thanks to the doctors, nurses, techs, EMTs, and park rangers who got me through the experience.
One of my favorites from The Temptations from among their cascade of hits from the mid-60s into the early 70s. Composed by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, released in 1969, hitting #1 and ranked by Billboard as the third most popular single of the year. From their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in September 1969.
