Paul Ehrlich, "population scientist" and author of The Population Bomb, died last week at the age of 93. And according to national correspondent Kevin D. Williamson, if ever there were an intellectual grave "that deserves pissing on posthaste," it's Ehrlich's.
Erlich was not simply wrong about almost everything he ever wrote or said or thought, writes Williamson, but positively and culpably dishonest—all in the name of book sales and self-promotion:
Like Karl Marx, another great prophet of the always-wrong-but-never-in-doubt school, Ehrlich believed that there is a kind of science of history and that, consequently, future events could be predicted with great confidence by those who were willing to—all together now!—follow the science. … He would later insist that The Population Bomb, published in 1968, had been "too optimistic," and the overpopulation cultists—it is a religious phenomenon—who looked to him for direction would insist from time to time that he had been kinda-sorta, if you squint in the right way, vindicated. That is not how you do the work of a public intellectual in a responsible way. It is, however, how you sell 3 million books in short order.
Read Williamson's touching full tribute to Paul Erlich, "the arch anti-natalist … who insisted that worldwide disaster was waiting in the wings but lived well into his 90s."
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