Paulcast

I've been watching Johnny Carson reruns (are there any other kind?) on Antenna TV.  It's a different world--less frantic, for one thing.  It's interesting to hear him do political jokes to see how things have changed.  Or haven't.

Just last week I saw Paul Ehrlich on a 1980 broadcast.  He's a biologist still with us, and had already been famous for over a decade by this appearance.  He was (and is) renowned for his doom-and-gloom forecasts, saying in his classic The Population Bomb (1968) that it wasn't long before there'd be major starvation in America (though he would claim he was just discussing a potential scenario).  Though he seemed to have been proved wrong by 1980, he was still pushing for Zero Population Growth.

We had 220 million Americans then, which he thought was too much.  He'd prefer to go back to around 150 million.  We now have 320 million, if you're wondering, and are not only not starving, but have a much bigger obesity problem than we used to. (Oddly, he was worried about illegal immigration.  What's that got to do with anything?  Even if it increased the population here, it'd help lower it elsewhere, so it's a wash.)

He made arguments which he should have known were questionable, but Johnny and the audience seemed to eat it up.  First, he said the pie is only so big, which is, I suppose, the central argument for keeping population down.  Except the size of the pie can change based on human ingenuity.

He also said--and this goes along with the limited pie--the fewer people there are, the bigger the share for everyone will be.  Really?  First, of course, we don't live in a hunter and gatherer world, we live in a world where people work to make products, including food, that others buy.  The more people there are, the more people there are who need things but also the more people there are to make things.  More important, in our modern economy, we have programs like Social Security and Medicare and public pensions that people pay into but don't fully pay for.  To keep these programs going, you need a bigger pool of earners or pretty soon every worker or two is responsible for keeping someone disabled or retired afloat.  If your population goes down, or even remains stable, someone's going to lose out.

Ehrlich also noted, when it comes to energy, that we'll be out of oil in twenty or thirty years, so we better figure out an alternative.  Well here it is 35 years later and we're still awash in the stuff.

So what's my point?  Nothing, except it's a mug's game to predict the future.  What he was saying then (and similar things he's saying now) were accepted by many as conventional wisdom.  CW doesn't have to be wrong, of course, but the future has a way of making even the smartest prognosticators look foolish.