This article from the recent issue of the Wilson Quarterly looks at the doom-is-coming-any-day-now crowd and the always fascinated public’s response to it, with a particular focus on population and the “impending demographic doom”.
Ehrlich’s book, The Population Bomb, was one of the first I remember reading way-back-when, that focused on environmental disaster issues and the doom that awaited us, and though shocking at the time, we have learned how wrong it was; but mostly we have learned how dramatically the explosion of knowledge and technology, particularly in the medical field, has been of benefit to humankind and will continue, even as population continues exploding.
Here is an excerpt.
Doom and Demography
by Nicholas Eberstadt
For decades, the world has been haunted by ominous and recurrent reports of impending demographic doom. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich’s neo-Malthusian manifesto, The Population Bomb, predicted mass starvation in the 1970s and ’80s. The Limits to Growth, published by the global think tank Club of Rome in 1972, portrayed a computer-model apocalypse of overpopulation.
The demographic doom-saying in authoritative and influential circles has steadily continued: from the Carter administration’s grim Global 2000 study in 1980 to the 1992 vision of eco-disaster in Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance to practically any recent publication or pronouncement by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).
What is perhaps most remarkable about the incessant stream of dire—and consistently wrong—predictions of global demographic overshoot is the public’s apparently insatiable demand for it. Unlike the villagers in the fable about the boy who cried wolf, educated American consumers always seem to have the time, the money, and the credulity to pay to hear one more time that we are just about to run out of everything, thanks to population growth. The Population Bomb and the Club of Rome’s disaster tale both sold millions of copies. More recently, journalist Robert D. Kaplan created a stir by trumpeting “the coming anarchy” in a 2000 book of the same name, warning that a combination of demographic and environmental crises was creating world-threatening political maelstroms in a variety of developing countries. Why, of all people, do Americans—who fancy themselves the world’s pragmatic problems-solvers—seem to betray a predilection for such obviously dramatic and unproved visions of the future?
Perhaps this American fascination is just a cultural foible—a penchant for a certain type of vicarious entertainment, no different in kind from, say, the famous British love of the murder mystery, and every bit as harmless. On the other hand, Miss Marple’s British devotees did not actually believe that Britain was in the grip of a crime wave being stymied by little blue-haired ladies, whereas many Americans appear to take quite seriously each new warning about imminent and catastrophic fallout from a global population explosion.
But maybe the obsession has to do, rather, with America’s hunger for—at times, near worship of—numbers. After all, the United States was a country of statistical pioneers. One of the very first acts of the newly formed U.S. government was a national population count. Yet this fondness for figures can veer from the pragmatic to the preposterous. Pitirim A. Sorokin, the Russian émigré who became the first chairman of Harvard University’s newly formed sociology department in the early 1930s, had a term for the problem. He called it “quantophrenia,” a psychological compulsion to grasp for the numeric. Victims of quantophrenia, in Sorokin’s wry diagnosis, obsess over numbers as descriptors, no matter how dubious their basis or questionable their provenance.
