I was born in the 1960s, just about the time people decided it was bad for children to be born.
Oh, I don’t take it personally. It’s just people started to worry about a “population explosion.”
Thanks to antibiotics, vaccines, mosquito eradication and better farming, people weren’t dying off as they had been.
But they were still having babies.
This led to more people.
And quite a few folks — themselves already born — thought that was bad.
We’d see mass starvation, he predicted, and food riots in American cities before the 1970s were out.
He urged the Federal Communications Commission to use its powers to ensure large families were always portrayed negatively on TV. (Take that, “Brady Bunch”!)
He made a bunch of predictions, and pretty much all turned out to be wrong.
(Instead of mass starvation, the biggest nutritional problem on Earth is now obesity, a problem even in countries once associated with hunger.)
That Ehrlich made a bundle on wrong predictions isn’t such a big deal — we’ve had dozens of doomsaying futurists who’ve cashed in on fears that never materialized.
The problem is people listened to him.
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