In the Simon-Ehrlich thing, as I think you acknowledge, no matter who won, we all lose, because they're both terrible futurists--there are a zillion ways you can falsify cornucopianism (or point out that it always depends on the idea that somehow we will invent a magical just-in-time solution to a catastrophe right at the moment of its occurrence; when you observe that this wasn't so in many past catastrophes, the cornucopian moves the goalposts and goes for a variation of Keynes' in-the-long-run by saying that eventually everybody got better and humanity still survives so hakuna matata baby. Only, you know, that's not because somebody came up with a brilliant solution eventually; it's mostly dumb luck or because almost all of the somebodies in one place died and eventually somebody else moved in, or all the somebodies in the catastrophe place took off and went to a new place where nobody was that wasn't so catastrophic. We're fresh out of places to move to now (and fuck off, Elon, Mars is not an option).
But Ehrlich, man, not only was he wrong, he and his bunch were pushing a bunch of policy ideas that thankfully were not as widely adopted as they might have been, like mandatory sterilization; there was a powerful stench of eugenics floating around his discourse. And his ideas have remained in the cultural air in some really gross ways--you absolutely cannot convince a major fraction of educated people of my age that global population growth turned out not to be that big of a problem and that for the most part, population growth fell off without strong government interventions, that the real issue was and remains the distribution of resources, food, etc.
Kelly and Sale is a more complicated thing as you say because the bet was more complicated and because Kelly and Sale are both slightly more complicated thinkers and prognosticators than Simon or Ehrlich.
I wouldn't be so hard on Ehrlich. If you read The Population Bomb, he never came out for forced sterilization. He did discuss the idea in the context of politics in India where it had been proposed and rejected. Ehrlich consistently argued for voluntary contraception. He never proposed something as drastic as China's one-child policy. If you read his book, once you get past the 1970s disaster movie scenarios in the first section, you find a sensible program for government and individual action. In fact, most of his ideas have been adopted successfully and have made a big difference. We'd be in much worse shape otherwise.
I think Karpf's article explains a lot of why people are still smearing Ehrlich today. You may have noticed the relative silence about the Club of Rome Report on its 50th anniversary. That was because it was spot on, and it was hard to find a good angle for bashing it. Ehrlich is a much easier target.
I think you're kind of underselling how long Ehrlich flirted with sterilization as well as other kinds of strong state interventions like aggressive anti-natalist taxation--it went beyond just the one book. Matthew Connelly's history Fatal Misconception I think puts Ehrlich into a broader and not very savory history of population explosion/control discourse.
As far as global population growth goes, the key underlying causes of the drop in growth rates everywhere but sub-Saharan Africa have little to do with anything Ehrlich recommended.
Interesting, I haven't read Connelly's book yet, will add it to the list.
One bit that sticks with me is that it seems like for both the population-reduction and the pronatalist crowds, there's a *lite* version that is mostly education and policy nudges, and then as soon as you move past the lite version you're immediately into authoritarianism+eugenicist territory.
Like, I remember Zero Population Growth in the '90s as basically the enviros arguing for condoms and sex ed classes. That's fine and good. And it's also the limits of the policy space before you get into truly awful, evil territory.
Similarly, the striking thing about today's weird pronatalist movement is that they reject all the simple, unobjectionable policy bits (paid parental leave, universal pre-K etc) that would make it easier for people to have more children if they want them. They instead jump right to creepy-eugenics (because the people leading the movement are Peter Thiel acolytes, so they hate government and love eugenics).
My vague impression is that Ehrlich did a ton of alarm-sounding, and offered apocalyptic warnings about the drastic steps we would need to take, but then mostly reverted to the lite, unobjectionable policy proposals. He also broke from the Tanton network once they took their racist turn, whereas Garrett Hardin was their fellow traveller throughout IIRC.
But I haven't studied those years well enough to be at all confident in that vague impression.
I've only read The Population Bomb, so I can't speak to his earlier or later work. His suggestions in that book now seem highly conventional and involved family planning propaganda and increased accessibility of contraceptives. He was also in favor of access to abortion and more education about sterilization as an option. Maybe he played down his actual agenda in that one book, but that's what I have to go on.
Have we read the same book? Ehrlich is very reserved with his policy prescriptions for the US, but far less so for developing nations, where he advocates for a kind of triage where rich nations withhold aid for nations or regions he deems hopeless, with strict migration control enforced from outside to keep those selected for starvatiom from migrating to the regions still receiving aid. He plays it a little coy insofar as he says nobody will be brave enough to enact this, but given that he multiple times in the book states that there is less than a decade left to reverse population trends and that his worst case scenarios include nuclear war it is fair to say that is what he proposes.
I agree with you about the Club of Rome report, but it is hard to over-exaggerate the influence Erlich had on governments struggling to control population booms in the 1970s. India's courts did reject forced sterilisation, but that was only the beginning. Instead, the national and many state governments switched to sterilisation programmes which were often unforced in name only. Women, especially in remote areas were forcefully sterilised. This carried on for decades. Sterilisation camps were only outlawed about seven or eight years ago.
About Ehrlich, I suppose the problem is not in being apocalyptic to get people's attention, but what do you do with that attention once you have it? Choosing to be more apocalyptic since that worked before is not the best decision. Tech optimism is much the same thing. Look at all the magical tools we have! Surely all we need is more magical tools to fix any problems caused by our magical tools. What could possibly go wrong?
I love that Simon was so suspicious of the government's role but the data he relied on was all collected by the government. It's unsurprising that the tech (now Internet) libertarians miss the irony. After all, the role of the government in creating powerful computational devices and the networks to connect them seems to never occur to them. When they constructed the bet (which Simon must have put together, since Ehrlich knew bupkis about commodities and their pricing), what are the odds that Simon, relying on those very government statistics, realized that those metals were at nearly their highest levels ever, adjusting for inflation?
Sabin does an excellent job of discussing the origins of the bet in his book. I think the odds are low, actually. Ehrlich, I think, made an offhand comment about how the prices were sure to rise. It was less that Simon knew they were already spiking than that he though "ah, there's a factoid I can pin him down on."
Our psychology drives us to make predictions. The pessimistic ones clearly play a role in avoiding danger, the optimistic ones in profiting from opportunity. Both are obviously deep seated (i.e. evolutionary) drivers. But they are also both unreliable estimates, often even unreliable 'shallow' estimates. The shallowness too is a fundamental aspect of our intelligence (as efficiency and speed are key as well from an evolutionary perspective), We also fantasize about our future the same way we do about our past (a fantasy we call memory). All of it is shallow. The thing we are also capable of is *realism* but it is much harder for us.
In short: Both pessimists and optimists are fantasists, who mostly illustrate the efficient general shallowness of our species' 'automatic' intelligence.
You've picked up on what has been bothering me about tech optimists lately. I'm a tech optimist myself in that I believe that any mitigation or progress is going to require technological advances. I just don't have the blind faith that seems to be necessary. I recently re-read Ehrlich and felt as you did, his forecasts were dire, but that was his rhetorical approach to convince people to take action. Would we have had the Green Revolution, population control push, modern medicine and so on deployed throughout the developing world if it hadn't been for alarmists like Ehrlich? You'll notice how little notice the Club or Rome report received on its 50th anniversary. That's likely because it was more or less spot on.
Tech optimists strike me as tree experts who have trouble seeing the forest. History is most easily viewed in hindsight when all the scores are in. Asimov exploited that idea wonderfully in his Foundation books. Consider the Sahel. You'll probably be reading more about the Sahel centered band of instability across Africa with its coups, poverty and as a great power battlefield. This is something Ehrlich and his ilk predicted in their warnings about population pressures, resources and climate change decades ago. Problems love marginal areas, and they aren't monotonic. The Sahel was in better shape in the 90s but the problems were mitigated no solved. Meanwhile the pressure is being felt across Africa and likely spreading elsewhere.
Meanwhile, the tech optimists and economists will be looking at easily manipulated and surprisingly uninformative metrics to convince themselves that no real change is needed beyond the introduction of some new app, cryptocurrency or futuristic toy. It really hit me when the US - One Billion thing came up with no explanation as to why the same arguments couldn't be made for 500 million or two billion or ten billion. It seemed like pure uninformed contrary-ism, smart guys writing what Ted Gioia calls The Old Switcheroo term papers. Meanwhile, there is the forest of net planetary product, our ignorance of ecology and the societal costs of status quo tech optimism.
I'm just old enough to remember when it was becoming obvious the Montreal Protocol was working and that the ozone hole was in fact shrinking. (If CFCs hadn't been banned excessive UVI across huge parts of the Earth would have been an existential disaster comparable to climate change). I'm also young enough to have never lived in a world where smallpox was a threat anywhere thanks to its eradication, which may be the single finest project the human race has ever pulled off.
These and similar efforts (like the Green Revolution) were massive undertakings that involved coordination between scientists, engineers, industrial leaders, politicians, workers mobilized on the ground, and countless other categories of people. It completely contradicts the Silicon Valley / tech optimist belief that problems are best solved by engineers and magnates acting heroically and individualistically through the power of magical code without having to figure out how to make sacrifices or work with people who are really different or that one might find yucky. This is IMO more psychological than even rooted in self-interest. The guys writing this stuff and their audiences have to a large extent never stopped thinking of themselves as The Smartest Little Boys In The World and problems of actual scale like these just scare them.
I think it's right that Ehrlich stayed scrupulously at the edges of actual advocacy of the creepy space beyond tax incentives, but a) he took a vaguely approving interest in countries that were adopting sterner policies, and b) his apocalyptic warnings were a pretty classic example of how liberals sometimes subcontract to authoritarians. See for another example the fondness of liberals for talking "what ifs" about ticking time bomb scenarios and torture, or Mark Bowden in the New Yorker interviewing Mossad agents about how torture really could be effective just prior to the Iraq War. Not actual advocacy, but playing around with narrative imagery that pre-emptively forgives those who actually take the next step. ("They were dealing with a crisis! They really thought they had to!")
Right on about the pronatalists now. The Christian Right doesn't want to do things that make having babies easier and safer, they want women to be in situations where they're compelled to make babies because there are no other options. The Peter Thiel people want more babies (of the right kind) not out of any specific ideas about valuing people, even in the icy sense of "human capital", it's just because they've read some Big History and discovered that societies going below replacement are heading for an explosive crisis. They're just trying to solve some psychohistorical equation as they understand it.
For me, optimism and pessimism are just two storytelling devices to interpret the probability of risk and progress. I’m struggling to grasp the takeaway of this piece, though. Are you arguing that “popular culture” is overly focused on the probability of progress and that we ought to be more attuned to the probability of risk?
I think that's the right approach to optimism and pessimism. One of the themes I'm trying to develop here though is that it isn't the approach that either the 90s tech optimists or our present day tech optimists (Sam Altman, etc) have taken. They treat optimism as an ideological commitment.
I think this ideological approach is still quite influential, particularly among the tech elite. So I'm attempting to clarify and critique its commitments. In this piece, I'm trying to expand on the theme by focusing on who they paint as villains.
Lately I’ve been feeling optimistic about the green transition but pessimistic about our capacity as humans to feel fulfilled. I’m not sure when that places me along the techno-optimism-pessimism spectrum: https://davidsasaki.substack.com/p/the-world-in-2050
In the Simon-Ehrlich thing, as I think you acknowledge, no matter who won, we all lose, because they're both terrible futurists--there are a zillion ways you can falsify cornucopianism (or point out that it always depends on the idea that somehow we will invent a magical just-in-time solution to a catastrophe right at the moment of its occurrence; when you observe that this wasn't so in many past catastrophes, the cornucopian moves the goalposts and goes for a variation of Keynes' in-the-long-run by saying that eventually everybody got better and humanity still survives so hakuna matata baby. Only, you know, that's not because somebody came up with a brilliant solution eventually; it's mostly dumb luck or because almost all of the somebodies in one place died and eventually somebody else moved in, or all the somebodies in the catastrophe place took off and went to a new place where nobody was that wasn't so catastrophic. We're fresh out of places to move to now (and fuck off, Elon, Mars is not an option).
But Ehrlich, man, not only was he wrong, he and his bunch were pushing a bunch of policy ideas that thankfully were not as widely adopted as they might have been, like mandatory sterilization; there was a powerful stench of eugenics floating around his discourse. And his ideas have remained in the cultural air in some really gross ways--you absolutely cannot convince a major fraction of educated people of my age that global population growth turned out not to be that big of a problem and that for the most part, population growth fell off without strong government interventions, that the real issue was and remains the distribution of resources, food, etc.
Kelly and Sale is a more complicated thing as you say because the bet was more complicated and because Kelly and Sale are both slightly more complicated thinkers and prognosticators than Simon or Ehrlich.
I wouldn't be so hard on Ehrlich. If you read The Population Bomb, he never came out for forced sterilization. He did discuss the idea in the context of politics in India where it had been proposed and rejected. Ehrlich consistently argued for voluntary contraception. He never proposed something as drastic as China's one-child policy. If you read his book, once you get past the 1970s disaster movie scenarios in the first section, you find a sensible program for government and individual action. In fact, most of his ideas have been adopted successfully and have made a big difference. We'd be in much worse shape otherwise.
I think Karpf's article explains a lot of why people are still smearing Ehrlich today. You may have noticed the relative silence about the Club of Rome Report on its 50th anniversary. That was because it was spot on, and it was hard to find a good angle for bashing it. Ehrlich is a much easier target.
I think you're kind of underselling how long Ehrlich flirted with sterilization as well as other kinds of strong state interventions like aggressive anti-natalist taxation--it went beyond just the one book. Matthew Connelly's history Fatal Misconception I think puts Ehrlich into a broader and not very savory history of population explosion/control discourse.
As far as global population growth goes, the key underlying causes of the drop in growth rates everywhere but sub-Saharan Africa have little to do with anything Ehrlich recommended.
Interesting, I haven't read Connelly's book yet, will add it to the list.
One bit that sticks with me is that it seems like for both the population-reduction and the pronatalist crowds, there's a *lite* version that is mostly education and policy nudges, and then as soon as you move past the lite version you're immediately into authoritarianism+eugenicist territory.
Like, I remember Zero Population Growth in the '90s as basically the enviros arguing for condoms and sex ed classes. That's fine and good. And it's also the limits of the policy space before you get into truly awful, evil territory.
Similarly, the striking thing about today's weird pronatalist movement is that they reject all the simple, unobjectionable policy bits (paid parental leave, universal pre-K etc) that would make it easier for people to have more children if they want them. They instead jump right to creepy-eugenics (because the people leading the movement are Peter Thiel acolytes, so they hate government and love eugenics).
My vague impression is that Ehrlich did a ton of alarm-sounding, and offered apocalyptic warnings about the drastic steps we would need to take, but then mostly reverted to the lite, unobjectionable policy proposals. He also broke from the Tanton network once they took their racist turn, whereas Garrett Hardin was their fellow traveller throughout IIRC.
But I haven't studied those years well enough to be at all confident in that vague impression.
I've only read The Population Bomb, so I can't speak to his earlier or later work. His suggestions in that book now seem highly conventional and involved family planning propaganda and increased accessibility of contraceptives. He was also in favor of access to abortion and more education about sterilization as an option. Maybe he played down his actual agenda in that one book, but that's what I have to go on.
Have we read the same book? Ehrlich is very reserved with his policy prescriptions for the US, but far less so for developing nations, where he advocates for a kind of triage where rich nations withhold aid for nations or regions he deems hopeless, with strict migration control enforced from outside to keep those selected for starvatiom from migrating to the regions still receiving aid. He plays it a little coy insofar as he says nobody will be brave enough to enact this, but given that he multiple times in the book states that there is less than a decade left to reverse population trends and that his worst case scenarios include nuclear war it is fair to say that is what he proposes.
I agree with you about the Club of Rome report, but it is hard to over-exaggerate the influence Erlich had on governments struggling to control population booms in the 1970s. India's courts did reject forced sterilisation, but that was only the beginning. Instead, the national and many state governments switched to sterilisation programmes which were often unforced in name only. Women, especially in remote areas were forcefully sterilised. This carried on for decades. Sterilisation camps were only outlawed about seven or eight years ago.
About Ehrlich, I suppose the problem is not in being apocalyptic to get people's attention, but what do you do with that attention once you have it? Choosing to be more apocalyptic since that worked before is not the best decision. Tech optimism is much the same thing. Look at all the magical tools we have! Surely all we need is more magical tools to fix any problems caused by our magical tools. What could possibly go wrong?
I love that Simon was so suspicious of the government's role but the data he relied on was all collected by the government. It's unsurprising that the tech (now Internet) libertarians miss the irony. After all, the role of the government in creating powerful computational devices and the networks to connect them seems to never occur to them. When they constructed the bet (which Simon must have put together, since Ehrlich knew bupkis about commodities and their pricing), what are the odds that Simon, relying on those very government statistics, realized that those metals were at nearly their highest levels ever, adjusting for inflation?
Sabin does an excellent job of discussing the origins of the bet in his book. I think the odds are low, actually. Ehrlich, I think, made an offhand comment about how the prices were sure to rise. It was less that Simon knew they were already spiking than that he though "ah, there's a factoid I can pin him down on."
Our psychology drives us to make predictions. The pessimistic ones clearly play a role in avoiding danger, the optimistic ones in profiting from opportunity. Both are obviously deep seated (i.e. evolutionary) drivers. But they are also both unreliable estimates, often even unreliable 'shallow' estimates. The shallowness too is a fundamental aspect of our intelligence (as efficiency and speed are key as well from an evolutionary perspective), We also fantasize about our future the same way we do about our past (a fantasy we call memory). All of it is shallow. The thing we are also capable of is *realism* but it is much harder for us.
In short: Both pessimists and optimists are fantasists, who mostly illustrate the efficient general shallowness of our species' 'automatic' intelligence.
You've picked up on what has been bothering me about tech optimists lately. I'm a tech optimist myself in that I believe that any mitigation or progress is going to require technological advances. I just don't have the blind faith that seems to be necessary. I recently re-read Ehrlich and felt as you did, his forecasts were dire, but that was his rhetorical approach to convince people to take action. Would we have had the Green Revolution, population control push, modern medicine and so on deployed throughout the developing world if it hadn't been for alarmists like Ehrlich? You'll notice how little notice the Club or Rome report received on its 50th anniversary. That's likely because it was more or less spot on.
Tech optimists strike me as tree experts who have trouble seeing the forest. History is most easily viewed in hindsight when all the scores are in. Asimov exploited that idea wonderfully in his Foundation books. Consider the Sahel. You'll probably be reading more about the Sahel centered band of instability across Africa with its coups, poverty and as a great power battlefield. This is something Ehrlich and his ilk predicted in their warnings about population pressures, resources and climate change decades ago. Problems love marginal areas, and they aren't monotonic. The Sahel was in better shape in the 90s but the problems were mitigated no solved. Meanwhile the pressure is being felt across Africa and likely spreading elsewhere.
Meanwhile, the tech optimists and economists will be looking at easily manipulated and surprisingly uninformative metrics to convince themselves that no real change is needed beyond the introduction of some new app, cryptocurrency or futuristic toy. It really hit me when the US - One Billion thing came up with no explanation as to why the same arguments couldn't be made for 500 million or two billion or ten billion. It seemed like pure uninformed contrary-ism, smart guys writing what Ted Gioia calls The Old Switcheroo term papers. Meanwhile, there is the forest of net planetary product, our ignorance of ecology and the societal costs of status quo tech optimism.
I'm just old enough to remember when it was becoming obvious the Montreal Protocol was working and that the ozone hole was in fact shrinking. (If CFCs hadn't been banned excessive UVI across huge parts of the Earth would have been an existential disaster comparable to climate change). I'm also young enough to have never lived in a world where smallpox was a threat anywhere thanks to its eradication, which may be the single finest project the human race has ever pulled off.
These and similar efforts (like the Green Revolution) were massive undertakings that involved coordination between scientists, engineers, industrial leaders, politicians, workers mobilized on the ground, and countless other categories of people. It completely contradicts the Silicon Valley / tech optimist belief that problems are best solved by engineers and magnates acting heroically and individualistically through the power of magical code without having to figure out how to make sacrifices or work with people who are really different or that one might find yucky. This is IMO more psychological than even rooted in self-interest. The guys writing this stuff and their audiences have to a large extent never stopped thinking of themselves as The Smartest Little Boys In The World and problems of actual scale like these just scare them.
I think it's right that Ehrlich stayed scrupulously at the edges of actual advocacy of the creepy space beyond tax incentives, but a) he took a vaguely approving interest in countries that were adopting sterner policies, and b) his apocalyptic warnings were a pretty classic example of how liberals sometimes subcontract to authoritarians. See for another example the fondness of liberals for talking "what ifs" about ticking time bomb scenarios and torture, or Mark Bowden in the New Yorker interviewing Mossad agents about how torture really could be effective just prior to the Iraq War. Not actual advocacy, but playing around with narrative imagery that pre-emptively forgives those who actually take the next step. ("They were dealing with a crisis! They really thought they had to!")
Right on about the pronatalists now. The Christian Right doesn't want to do things that make having babies easier and safer, they want women to be in situations where they're compelled to make babies because there are no other options. The Peter Thiel people want more babies (of the right kind) not out of any specific ideas about valuing people, even in the icy sense of "human capital", it's just because they've read some Big History and discovered that societies going below replacement are heading for an explosive crisis. They're just trying to solve some psychohistorical equation as they understand it.
For me, optimism and pessimism are just two storytelling devices to interpret the probability of risk and progress. I’m struggling to grasp the takeaway of this piece, though. Are you arguing that “popular culture” is overly focused on the probability of progress and that we ought to be more attuned to the probability of risk?
I think that's the right approach to optimism and pessimism. One of the themes I'm trying to develop here though is that it isn't the approach that either the 90s tech optimists or our present day tech optimists (Sam Altman, etc) have taken. They treat optimism as an ideological commitment.
I sketch out that theme at length in this previous essay: https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/on-technological-optimism-and-technological
I think this ideological approach is still quite influential, particularly among the tech elite. So I'm attempting to clarify and critique its commitments. In this piece, I'm trying to expand on the theme by focusing on who they paint as villains.
Lately I’ve been feeling optimistic about the green transition but pessimistic about our capacity as humans to feel fulfilled. I’m not sure when that places me along the techno-optimism-pessimism spectrum: https://davidsasaki.substack.com/p/the-world-in-2050