The Population Bomb
By Paul R. Ehrlich (Ballantine Books)
Once, when I was working on a degree that I would not get, I took a statistics class. The professor wrote only one thing on my final exam “all your answers are wrong, but all your methods are right.”
The Population Bomb is the central book of the Zero Population Growth movement. With as much as this comes up as a concept in my reading, I felt like I had to go to the source. In it, the author theorizes that population growth is the singular problem of human life, because it represents the greatest existential threat.
The threat amounts to what we would now call food security, and the many ways its opposite leads to conflicts, even if the conflicts are nominally about other things. It is also attached to traditional environmentalism, or nature conservation, and the effects of larger populations on globe through pollution, and agricultural inputs in particular.
There is a useful core thesis that no, line not go up. This is a position that has bipartisan advocates but customarily loses out to line! go! up!. The material requirements for human life have limitations. There is only so much of anything, and while much is renewable, not everything is. The human mind is not geared to think on this scale, but if we are not going to self-destruct, it has to be a thing.
In a word, ecology is science. Which was novel at the time of writing. Anthropocentrism is dangerous because we operate in a system of systems, and surprising negative externalities arise, particularly because human culture, itself a series of systems, will magnify the results.
This is a good way to think. I think that one of the more striking moments in the book is that he discusses the concerns about greenhouse gas emissions, discusses the possibility of it leading to global warming, and discusses the possibility of it leading to global cooling. And then the author flips the debate: the question is not what is going to happen as much as we know the facts, here carbon emissions, and even if we cannot say how it will change the system, we can expect change. Good, bad, or indifferent to humans, big or small, you cannot do a thing without affecting other things. We cannot continue to sustain human culture without humility.
The rest?
I am glad to have read The Krebiozen Hoax before this, because it feels like Ivy and the author have the same sort of abiding mystery to their characters. You are a genius. You come up with this as the answer?
None of the complaints that I heard about the book were justified. Racist? Yes, but not in the way that you are thinking about. Eugenicist? Not really, or at least de facto and not de jure. Factually incorrect? Yes, or it is near 0% accuracy on any of its predictions. But most are credibly wrong. The perfect example is that the author is fully aware of the ‘Green Revolution’ happening at the same time as the book is being published, but is approaching its results conservatively.
The right complaint is that the solutions are awful in a sort of error tiramisu. There are layers of wrongness, some of which operate independently and others that become wrong when seeped through other sorts of wrong ideas.
The author draws a feels not reals distinction between the developed and undeveloped world. It is oversimplified and orientalist. He then provides solutions, dividing them between the two classes of states.
The solutions aren’t. Or, much like the dividing up of the world, the fixes are arbitrary. For instance, the author builds policy around having only two children, and delaying children until the age of 23. I can intuit why this is what it is, but it is never explained. In other words, I do not know whether two kids is supposed to in order to ‘net out’ a family in terms of total population, because that creates a particular genetic stability in a population, or whether it is to have an heir and a spare so that you keep the barony.
The developed world solutions feel Nudge Theory, all tax credits and lottery tickets. The undeveloped world solutions are just as patronizing, but more intrusive and direct like mandatory sterilization or birth control devices. I feel like the author is teetering on the edge of his own observations at points. For instance, he is able to describe failed “family planning” efforts in one section, and then reiterate the same plan as correct, but imagining a version funded with the developed world’s blood and treasure, as opposed to their donating food now.
It is interesting in the way that the author keys into the importance of cultural change, in the sense of having people trying to affect the media landscape, but the specifics tend to be who what now, like writing angry letters about Mother’s Day fluff pieces. And all this is in the context of complaining about how ineffective that the current work done to solve the problem is.
Equally interesting is the indecision about economics. On one hand, socialism is a bugbear to which the starving turn; on the other, capitalism’s eternal growth is physically unsustainable and leads to similar class war. The need for the developed world to reduce its standard of living is suggested, but only in a transactional sense: your wallet is lighter because taxes are higher because that money has to go to free IUDs in the developing world.
There is no investigation about standard of living as a concept, which runs to the unspoken assumptions at work here.
I am reminded of AI threat. You have identified an actual problem, and come up with a battery of solutions, but those solutions primarily reflect your biases about the world and you are asking for a lot of money to come up with more hackysack circle grade speculations. You are the worst kind of grifter. You do not believe you are a grifter and your bleating distracts from sober thinking on an important topic.
CITATION HEEDED 