DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

Read it.

The most amazing feature of all of this writing is the silence about the failure of the “biological forecasting” of people like Paul Ehrlich.   When Ehrlich’s Population Bomb was published in 1968, the world population was three and one half billion.  Today, the population has just passed seven billion.  This was not supposed to happen.  Ehrlich predicted that mass starvation in the 1970’s would cause a collapse of world population to bring it down to the “carrying capacity” of the Earth. This is the logic of Thomas Malthus:  human population grows until there is not enough food to feed everyone, and then the population drops dramatically through famine, war, or disease until the balance with limited natural resources is restored.  While many people have starved in many parts of the world over the past 50 years, the average human life-span and per capita wealth have increased around the world.

Guess he didn’t have the ‘climate change’ bandwagon on which to ride.

If scientific research is to be judged by falsifiable predictions, then the science of those like Ehrlich has been refuted by their record of falsified predictions.  In contrast to Ehrlich, Julian Simon argued that population growth was good as long as free markets and free trade allowed human entrepreneurial and inventive genius to find new ways to turn natural resources to productive uses.  To prove his point, Simon challenged Ehrlich to a bet.  In 1980, Ehrlich could pick a list of five commodity metals.  If Ehrlich was right, he would predict that by 1990 these metals would be so scarce that their prices would have risen.  If Simon was right, their prices would drop.  Ehrlich lost the bet.  The prices in 1990, adjusted for inflation, had dropped, just as Simon predicted.

And yet, like AlGore, he keeps on bloviating, and people keep on giving him money and respect.

In 1989, I was on a year-long sabbatical at Stanford University doing research on “Darwinian natural right,” and I audited some of the classes in the “Program in Human Biology” at Stanford.  Ehrlich is a Stanford biologist, and he lectured to some of the classes.  The students and faculty treated him with awe.  I was astonished that he was never challenged for his embarrassing failures.  In 1990, he lost his bet.  But he also received the “genius award” of the MacArthur Foundation!

This is a tenured professor at a top-ten university. If you want evidence on how our educational system is broken, look no further.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 10th, 2012 at 06:31 and is filed under Dystopia Watch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.