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Trump just called for a big commitment to U.S. shipbuilding. Yet another instance of ripped-from-the-pages-of-today’s-headlines for my 2021 book THE BLUE AGE.
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Gregg Easterbrook
23K posts
Gregg Easterbrook
@EasterbrookG
"The Blue Age" in bookstores now. Starred review, Kirkus: "Outstanding." Suitably quirky All Predictions Wrong now at Substack. TMQ has returned in same place.
Washington, D.C. Katılım Temmuz 2009
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@wil_da_beast630 on the Tonight Show in 1970 he said Green Revolution would fail
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It's worth noting - again - that Erlich, a pro with access to the best academic pre-prints of his era, failed to predict BOTH birth control and real feminism AND the Green Revolution.
Ooops.
Jake Walker@Jake_W
Paul Ehrlich was wrong. Re-upping this.
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@G_S_Bhogal Yet it worked out for him in the sense that he received the honors and celebrity he sought. it says something about our moment that optimistic messages are shunned while doomsday claims fall on eager ears.
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Ehrlich made one huge miscalculation and then spent much of his career contorting himself into a pretzel to justify it. He was a powerful case study of how the fear of looking stupid can make a smart man genuinely stupid.
The Honest Broker@RogerPielkeJr
This from Paul Ehrlich will make you think "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." Link in reply
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@mkhammer you can still buy a pocket transistor radio for $10. it's portable! no monthly fee!
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How deprived of new devices are my kids? One daughter is listening to a little mp3 player in the car, tells me, v. excited, that she found some old-timey music. Readers, it was an AM station playing classical music. Apparently it has a radio function. Everything old is new again!
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@EasterbrookG - did you see you are mentioned in this one? mackinac.org/blog/2024/the-…
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"It’s a great irony of my life that at my public high school, we read Ehrlich while never learning about Borlaug."
Mackinac Center@MackinacCenter
.@PaulREhrlich , author of The Population Bomb, built a reputation on dire predictions of mass starvation driven by population growth. Those predictions didn’t come true because he overlooked "the ultimate resource:" human ingenuity. As the world’s population grew, so did its food supply, thanks largely to innovators like Norman Borlaug. Through new crop varieties and agricultural breakthroughs, Borlaug helped countries such as Mexico, India, and Pakistan move from grain shortages to abundance. mackinac.org/blog/2024/the-…
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@EasterbrookG @is_OwenLewis We should praise Norman Borlaug, but birth rates are plummeting almost everywhere, including in poverty areas. An economist, Villaverde suggests peak population may arrive as soon as 2050.
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🧵 1/14: Just days after Paul Ehrlich (the man whose 1968 book “The Population Bomb” predicted billions would starve) passed away, it’s the perfect moment to celebrate the scientist who proved Ehrlich and other doomsayers spectacularly wrong.
Meet Norman Borlaug, the Iowa farm boy who launched the Green Revolution and quite literally saved a billion lives. This is the ultimate story of human ingenuity triumphing over scarcity.
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This from Paul Ehrlich will make you think
"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."
Link in reply
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Amazingly, blowing some stuff up did not make the situation better. How could we possibly have known?
nytimes.com/2026/03/18/us/…
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with my three rising-senior kids when we toured a campus on a sunny day they said "this college is great" if it was cold and raining they said "I am never going here"
NBER@nberpubs
Poor weather when touring a college campus reduces students' likelihood of applying, from Olivia Feldman, Joshua M. Hyman, and @MattMcGann nber.org/papers/w34944
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@VFerrerNow @kingharis @FeedbackRobust @JDMartin1998 that's a good line! bet the Club of Rome bar ran out of beer...
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@kingharis @FeedbackRobust @EasterbrookG @JDMartin1998 He was great fun over drinks at the Club Of Rome meeting so....
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Ehrlich was a good person -- I will detail my relationship to him on Friday -- but wrong on every prediction. Not on some predictions, EVERY prediction. Such is the nature of doomsaying.
Peter J. Hasson@peterjhasson
This is Paul Ehrlich’s legacy
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@raefneerg Garrett Hardin wanted forced sterilization. it's eerie how intellectuals fall into these traps
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@ECLOGITE110 I have a play in the works in which two characters in 1929 debate Sanger
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@RobertG49643388 @kausmickey as Wanda Sykes would say, "Too much."
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@EasterbrookG @kausmickey Pol Pot… great guy when you got him alone.
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@amyalkon I debated him in 1995 and he devoted a book chapter to denouncing me in 1996, so don't feel that much like a fangirl
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@EasterbrookG Your appraisal of him seems to have a strong whiff of slavish fangirling of someone “of note.”
Robby Soave@robbysoave
Paul Ehrlich, who predicted that rising global population levels would cause mass starvation and environmental ruin, and that "England will not exist in the year 2000," has died. He was arrogantly wrong, about everything; his proposed solutions reduced human freedom and prosperity wherever they were tried.
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@amyalkon he was surrounded by enablers, including Sixty Minutes as late as 2023
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@EasterbrookG It takes a sick level of dehumanization to advocate for this (conveniently covered for as some kind of positive measure)—and one wonders whether skin color and non-Western culture had anything to do with this.
Alec Stapp@AlecStapp
In the late 1960's, Paul Ehrlich was advocating for cutting off emergency food aid to India. This would have caused mass starvation. When people say that he was evil, this is what they mean.
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@EasterbrookG A good person would not have led an international crusade to eliminate the children of poor through abortion and forced sterilization. He was an evil, evil man and the world is a better place without him. It will be better still when his ideas cease to have any influence at all.
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@68stretchy @PessimistsArc @cremieuxrecueil and more on exactly that coming Friday! I detail the debate I once had with Paul and how our various predictions stood the test of time
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@PessimistsArc @cremieuxrecueil @EasterbrookG has been writing for years about how pessimistic people are seen as having gravitas while optimistic people are seen as lightweights.
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Paul Ehrlich is a testament to the power of pessimism privilege:
get predictions totally wrong, cause massive harm, never back down, get cushy job, get fawning obituaries.
Pessimists Archive@PessimistsArc
Rest in Pessimism Paul Ehrlich newsletter.pessimistsarchive.org/p/is-ai-fear-t…
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@Milbank Dana I still remember some of your writing for TNR. Writing that is actually remembered is rare today. Congrats.
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I am leaving the Washington Post to join a new journalistic venture backed by Politico founder Robert Allbritton that will be both the hometown publication the D.C. region sorely needs and a scrappy and fearless national news organization. I hope you'll join us.
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