Talk:The Population Bomb

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Oil Section
The section about oil seems like an unnecessary diversion. I'd rather see more information about the book and its predictions, and less (nothing) about present-day predictions that are related only by the predictive criteria.

Geoff Canyon 23:33, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Starvation Deaths
The article's claim that hundred of millions did not die from starvation during the 1970s and 1980s is false. It is estimated that 60 million die each year from starvation,though not from lack of ability to produce enough food, but from the lack of proper distribution of it.

It appears that as Ehrlich wrote it, his prediction may have been technically correct, in that over 200 million people very likely died of starvation between 1970 and 1979. Estimates I've seen for 2005 range from 25,000 to 35,000 per day, which mean between 91 and 128 million deaths per decade. It seems that Ehrlich considers the spirit of this prediction to be wrong, but I can't find any corroboration of that. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find anything about long term trends in starvation deaths to shed any useful light on the value of the letter or the spirit of the prediction. &mdash;BozoTheScary 22:41, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

POV in introduction
LOURDES BOYS HIGH SCHOOL It looks to me that the most recent edit has inserted a POV assertion about the cause of starvation being conclusively or exclusively a matter of politics. This POV is as bad or worse than the prior POV argument it replaced. Neither of the comments were sourced and look like mere opinion or original research. Anyone know enough about this topic to accurately phrase an NPOV description? Ande B 07:34, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Poor representation of this book
This article contains a heavy political bias. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 69chelsea (talk • contribs) 05:17, 12 December 2006 (UTC).

This book is a fraud
Please, this best-seller is a complete fraud.All prophecies of this book were showed as a fraud.The fact of this book's ideas had support from WWF,Ford Foundation and so many ecological foundations doesn't negates, the fact of this book to be a fraud. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 201.9.35.158 (talk) 14:14, 3 April 2008 (UTC)


 * The book's focus stops at the food situation but what comes after that through lack of food and lack of livelihoods is ignored. Therefore the book appears incomplete. Lack of food and livelihood leads to rivalries, oppression, and hostilities. These drive people out of their countries and upset the balance of other countries. It is said that today, in 2013, 45 000 000 people on this globe are looking for a place where to have a livelihood. With the Washington Earth Institute predicting 3 additional billion by 2050, or 81 000 000 more each year, and no livelihoods in sight, it could well be argued that the population bomb is with us today. 47 million on food stamps in the US, asylum seekers in Australia and continental Europe, illigal immigrants into the UK are all examples that there is population pressure, and in fact a population bomb. 144.136.192.37 (talk) 05:03, 23 July 2013 (UTC)


 * The initial writer is correct, if not overly hyperbolic in his intent. Almost 50 years after the research, a statistically significant number of data points, there is little evidence of Ehrlich being correct about anything -- except perhaps as acting as in a Casandra capacity all these years. I'd admit that is a useful pursuit. Mostly Ehrlich's predictions have been incorrect because he refused to consider economic impacts. Consider the above citation on the numbers on food stamps. That is a symptom of a problem, not a root cause. Julian Simon was correct to point to commodity prices as a reasonable proxy of the power of technical innovation. Let's for instance take a look at energy prices as more LNG development occurs, and unstable Mid-east oil producers become increasingly marginalized. 10stone5 (talk) 05:54, 31 August 2013 (UTC)

This is NOT the place for a criticism of the book itself. It is a Talk Page for how this article is written. Those are two different things. Your personal opinion of this book has no place here. 174.171.71.34 (talk) 18:59, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

Evidence of Bias in the Article
In this article it says, "Ehrlich's book does not explain why South Korea is so much better off than North Korea, but an analysis of property rights explains this difference very well." This is biased against Erlich's book. It should be changed to reflect neutrality. Thank you very much. Sealpiano (talk) 22:17, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

Deleted this sentence. There are MANY factors that explain the differences between North and South Korea besides property rights. More generally, the criticisms of this book are slanted towards a libertarian perspective, when there have been many other types of critiques against this book. 7 August 2009 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.220.114.128 (talk) 17:21, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

This Wikipedia article on Paul Ehrlich's book The Population Bomb is dubious and unfairly negative. I have just deleted one of its errors, a sentence in the section "Faulty Predictions" that was itself completely false and very misleading. The sentence read as follows: "In a magazine article published in 1969 (just one year after the Population Bomb), he [Ehrlich] stated that the United States would see its life expectancy drop to 42 years by 1980 because of pesticide usage, and the nation's population would drop to 22.6 million by 1999." In the notes section of the Wiki article, the source for that sentence was listed as "Ehrlich, Paul. 'Eco-Catastrophe.' Ramparts, Sept 1969, pages 24-28."

After many months of wondering about that sentence and its source, I recently located and read the cited article in Ramparts magazine. Just as I expected, the original passage was very inaccurately paraphrased in the Wiki article. To begin with, Ehrlich's "Eco-Catastrophe!" article is prefaced by the following note from the editor of Ramparts: "In the following scenario, Dr. Paul Ehrlich predicts what our world will be like in ten years if the present course of environmental destruction is allowed to continue" (page 24). Notice the words "scenario," "if," "present course," and "allowed to continue." They all indicate a fictional scenario that could only be considered a rough prediction of the future IF the level of environmental degradation in 1969 were to continue without any change for the better. It did not so continue, of course, because the growing environmental movement, with increasing millions of activists, successfully protested many acts of pollution by big industry in the US and the world at large.

Ehrlich himself began his 1969 Ramparts article with the words: "The end of the ocean came late in the summer of 1979, and it came even more rapidly than biologists had expected." So, very obviously, and right from the start, this futuristic scenario was a fictional/very hypothetical one. Moreover, the specific "statement" that Ehrlich made within that fictional/hypothetical scenario was itself also a conditional one. His words (again, in 1969) were: "In October 1973, the [U.S.] Department of Health, Education and Welfare ... predicted that if current patterns continued, this [life] expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980...." (p. 26). Notice the conditional words "if" and "would." And yet, whoever added the terribly misleading paraphrase of Ehrlich's words to the Wikipedia article on the Population Bomb gave his or her readers no indication that the original passage was written in such a doubly hypothetical context.

The second part of that same sentence in the Wiki article, stating that Ehrlich, in his 1969 Ramparts article, also wrote that the U.S. population would "drop to 22.6 million by 1999," turns out to be even more dubious than the first part. That second part does not appear in any form whatsoever in Ehrlich's article. I carefully read the article four times looking for it, without finding any trace of it. The person who added that sentence to the Wiki article (apparently sometime in early 2007) was therefore not only very dishonest, but also very confused. And so, to repeat, I've just deleted the entire sentence. It was another wild case of Ehrlich-bashing. Other examples can doubtless be found in this Wiki article. Please, people, let's stop such mean-spirited nonsense. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 204.38.4.80 (talk) 16:49, 29 December 2009 (UTC)

A few days ago I deleted a sentence from this Wikipedia article on The Population Bomb. The sentence had erroneously and unfairly paraphrased the book's author, Paul Ehrlich, as "predicting" something that he actually never predicted. Today, Jan. 3, 2010, I have deleted another erroneous and unfair statement from the article. It read:

"Demographers have criticized the book; chiefly Phillip Longman, who in his 2004 book The Empty Cradle argues that the 'baby boom' of the 1950s was an aberration unlikely to be repeated and that population decline in an urbanized society is by nature hard to prevent because children in such a society are an economic liability."

I deleted that statement for four reasons:

First, the blanket assertion "Demographers have criticized the book" should more properly read "Some demographers...," since not all demographers have criticized The Population Bomb, or at least not criticized it much. Some also praised the book, and many praised parts of it.

Second, Longman in his own book The Empty Cradle mentions Ehrlich's name only twice, both times on p. 133, and not so critically. Longman simply quotes two sentences from Ehrlich's Population Bomb, then comments merely, "Ehrlich was wrong about at least the timing of his predicted catastrophes." Longman seems to admit thereby that although no such catastrophic famines occurred in the 1970s, nor since then, they may still occur. Elsewhere in his book Longman even half-supports Ehrlich's 1968 predictions of impending mass famine when he, Longman, writes: "Without the genetically modified seeds that brought us the 'green revolution' of the late 1960s and 1970s, there would be mass starvation" (p.121). Longman thereby admits, though without mentioning Ehrlich's name, that a sudden technological advance just barely prevented catastrophic famines in the late 20th century. So, Longman and his book The Empty Cradle cannot correctly be cited as being very (or "chiefly") critical of Ehrlich.

Third, the comment about the Baby Boom of the 1950s being an "aberration unlikely to be repeated..." is irrelevant and misleading. True, another such baby boom seems very unlikely to be repeated in the USA or elsewhere in the developed world, but a very similar baby boom continues to occur today among populations in most of the Third World, and with it, in much of the entire world, which is the main subject of Ehrlich's Population Bomb. Ironically, fertility rates in the Third World, though they have declined somewhat in recent decades, are mostly still as high (or even higher) today than fertility rates in the USA were during the "Baby Boom" period of 1946-64. Please check the latest statistics on the fertility rates in sub-Saharan Africa and in most Islamic nations, and you will clearly read this fact. Most countries in both regions currently have fertility rates of at least 3 and often 4 or 5 babies on average per woman. So, there is indeed an ongoing population explosion in much/most of the Third World. There would be even more explosive world population growth today if not for the mandatory, government-enforced "one child only" policy in China, with its huge population equal to one-sixth of the world's total.

Fourth and finally, the statement that "population decline in an urbanized society is by nature hard to prevent" sidesteps the fact that at present only about 50 percent of the world's people live in urban societies, and that that number will never reach 100% or anywhere near it. As long as many people remain largely rural/tribal, they will probably continue to have fertility rates higher than the replacement level. Moreover, even many urbanized areas of the Third World (e.g. the big-city slums of India and Pakistan) have fertility rates considerably above replacement level, though certain demographers say that's not supposed to be happening. I also seriously question the phrase "population decline" as used in the deleted sentence. Exactly what does it mean? How far is the "decline" supposed to go? The fact is that people have a natural desire for families and children. And so a continued birthrate or population "decline" in most urban societies, to a level well below that of replacement, seems extremely unlikely, even if, as that statement also said, "children in an [urbanized] society are an economic liability." The sobering outlook today is that world population figures may never actually decline due to world fertility rates dropping below the replacement level, but may only decline due to death rates rising considerably. Such a rise in the world death rate is certainly easy to envision as happening via major wars, plagues, famines, etc., all partly or largely caused by overpopulation.

It's rather disturbing that that erroneous and misleading statement I quoted above, which was posted here on Wiki by someone in August 2006 (three and a half long years ago), has not been questioned and removed until now.

John L. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.40.193.212 (talk) 17:15, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

Today I deleted a sentence from the "Specific Critics" section of this Wiki article on the Population Bomb. It was unfair to Ehrlich and his book. The passage claimed that Betsy Hartman, author of Reproductive Rights and Wrongs (1987), had written there that Ehrlich was "misanthropic and anti-feminist." Upon doing an Amazon "Search Inside the Book" for those two words, I found that neither word occurs even once in Hartman's book. Moreover, upon checking the book itself in a library this week, I noticed that Hartman only once claimed Ehrlich was "sexist" (p. 22), and not at all convincingly. Hartman justified her criticism so: "Implicitly, it is women's fertility which is out of control" (also p. 22). That is all she says on the subject of Ehrlich and women in her entire book. She thus seemed to think Ehrlich had implied that women were totally responsible (guilty) for the world's uncontrolled overpopulation problem by their having had too many babies. Such an interpretation of Ehrlich's book is obviously false and extremely unfair. Ehrlich clearly sympathized greatly with women and the burden of childbearing they bear. He also recognized that the sexual drives of men were at least half, and probably much more than half, responsible for high birth rates in human populations. So I think it best to delete this invalid "criticism" by Hartman from the Wiki article. It was just another cheap shot at Ehrlich. Let's be more fair.

John L. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.40.193.212 (talk) 19:20, 16 January 2010 (UTC)

Food supply
The yield per unit area graphs for the third world show a sigmoid characteristic, not exponential. Clearly the amount of land being cultivated may have also grown. Nonetheless laims for exponentiality need very solid backing. Rich Farmbrough, 13:33, 17 September 2009 (UTC).

Linear vs exponential growth
I laughed out loud when I saw this:

"Nonetheless, it is still conceptually incorrect to claim that world population (or US population) is growing linearly. The world population doubled from 3 billion in 1959 to 6 billion in 1999 and is expected to grow by another 3 billion by 2042 [5]."

This is a very poor example to illustrate that point. From 1959 to 1999 is 40 years, and the population increased by 3 billion. From 1999 to 2042 is 43 years, and the population increased by 3 billion. This cannot be told from linear growth within the uncertainty of the cited figures. If the figures are assumed to be exact, then this is actually SUBlinear growth, because it took 3 year longer to add the same number of people!

Exponential growth is characterized by a constant time to double, not a constant time to increase. Surely some period of history could be chosen that does exhibit exponential growth. It appears we do not currently live in such a time, but 1950 - 1990 would do nicely; I get a doubling time of 37 years from the data presented in the Wikipedia article "World population".Shrikeangel (talk) 23:41, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

Malthsian Junk Science and Demographic Transition Theory
The major criticism that epidemiologists and other scientists make of works like this is that no one uses Malthusian theory to model food production or population growth. Demographic transition theory has successfully modelled the population declines in Japan, Korea, most of Europe, and other developed societies. China has completed a demographic transition and its population is declining. India is half way through one, with South/West India having a TFR < 2.1. Malthus' work is pseudo-science because it is not a testable hypothesis. I'm hoping that more scientific work will be incorporated into this page. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.111.247.24 (talk) 23:06, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

Democracy and a free press?
Idiotic statement, it´s the GUN protocol that does that, democracy and a free press solely pertaining to the instance of rallying to call forth all men and women willng to holster to ENFORCE a NON-famine relationship AT gun-point, and THAT, inhibits most any form of localized warlordism with pretense to force famine relationships to retain forms of aristocratic subsidianisms from conglomerate coffers.

Famine, is an imposed enslavement regime, either directly or indirectly through monetairy policy with a FAST history of racial and species genocide progroms on the table, including that one, that forces famine through overpopulation propaganda in order TOO force individuals into a militarized regime. Warlords, require men with nothing much too loose, which both overpopulation and THE famine protocols pertain too.

Is this soo darn difficult to understand that not even those nomered Mensa or other groups above that can clearly state those instances, or is it that most all politicians AND police enforcement are directed to breaking society into asperger sections to maintain their own hierarchical warlord and subsidianisms from conglomerate coffers status???

There used to be a time, not too long ago, where all politicians whom would NOT holster (on a dayly basis), where NOT considered of sufficient mettle to follow, those politicians pertaining to other collaterol then themselves. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 201.248.123.72 (talk) 15:14, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

Overweight "Criticism" section
The "Criticisims" section, which makes up about 65% of the article, seems to have a couple of serious and obvious problems. First, it is essentially a rehash of arguments from the book by Dan Gardner, a newspaper journalist for the Ottawa Citizen. As such it gives undue weight to one person's opinion, and a non-scientist at that, from Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Fail.

Second, the material in the section not from Gardner's book is a synthesis from other sources which do not mention Ehrlich or his book, and should not be included: Per guidelines, Do not combine material from multiple sources to reach or imply a conclusion not explicitly stated by any of the sources. Some of the facts used and sources are from UN and FAO.

In addition, guidelines state we should "Avoid sections and articles focusing on criticisms or controversies". Not only is that guideline ignored, but the premise of the section is based on misstatement: "The Ehrlichs made a number of specific predictions," and is even included in a subsection called "Predictions." Later, the article states, with direct quotes, that they in fact "never made predictions."

So as it reads now, after a synopsis of the 47-year-old book, the article is basically a crystal ball-breaking promo for someone else's book. It also could mislead readers, who, after reading mostly Gardner's opinions, then see a section called "Ehrlich's response," wrongfully implying that much of his response was to Gardner's arguments. The result is that the article is not primarily about the book, but is a hindsight debate about some of the the book's so-called "predictions." Suggest fixing. --Light show (talk) 22:53, 14 June 2015 (UTC)


 * Agree to some extent. However, based on a simple word count of the criticism section, it makes up more like 40% of the prose of the article (1215/2872 words). This is too much but not quite so dire as you make it sound. Agree there is too much synthesis of tangentially related material; that should certainly be removed or re-sourced. It is also true that wiki guidelines suggest (but do not forbid) making specific criticism sections, but the practice is certainly wide-spread. Regarding the "predictions," Ehrlich says he didn't make predictions, but that is contested, so it is a bit of a difficult issue regarding how best to address the difference in opinion in an NPOV wiki article. The article relies too heavily on Gardner, especially if you remove the synthesis materials. A broader and more in-depth discussion of the book would certainly be welcome. I would invite you to be bold and begin introducing the changes you would like to see. Peregrine981 (talk) 15:38, 16 June 2015 (UTC)

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Possible additions to Criticism section
I was looking up something else online, when I stumbled onto these two links, one a podcast where the hosts talk about their views on the racism and fallacies of the book and damage it did, and the other off a Marxist archive on the same topic as others in the section. I think that there is something there to add context, but I am not sure if they meet the criteria for reliable sources, so I will leave them here for discussion. https://www.buzzsprout.com/2040953/11875391-the-population-bomb https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ca.firstwave/cpl-abortion/section8.htm MarvelAge91 (talk) 19:19, 2 January 2023 (UTC)


 * What about conservative criticism of the book? 69.113.233.201 (talk) 02:07, 10 October 2023 (UTC)