| ||||||||||||||||||
|
Browse our Bookshelf Favorites store for big savings on popular fiction, nonfiction, children's books, and more. |
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images? |
He spends the next 180 pages proving conclusively that such is not the case.
It isn't simply that his predictions turned out to be wrong in some of the particulars, but rather that they were so completely wrong that they will NEVER come to pass (though he unrepentantly continues to beat the same drum).
Ehrlich predicted that, by the end of the 20th century, human want would outstrip available resources; whole areas of human endeavor would screech to a halt due to resource scarcity; England would, in all likelihood, cease to exist; India would collapse due to its inability to feed itself; and "inevitable" mass starvation would sweep the globe (including the US). We were on the brink of disaster in 1968, and the future looked very, very dark. In fact, he asserts, "it is now too late to take action to save many of those people."
And yet none of these things have come to pass. Why? Because Ehrlich makes the same mistake that Malthus did: he confuses the concept of finite resources with the notion that they (and the demand for them) are fixed. This is the point that Ehrlich's detractors (most notably Julian Simon) have been making for decades.
Ehrlich did not foresee the technological innovations (the Green Revolution) that have been such a boon to mankind, or changes in both the supply and demand of various resources (such as those in his famous bet with Simon). But such changes were inevitable (far more than the catastrophe that he predicted). The entire history of human endeavor is adaptive. As resources become more scarce, their costs rise.
... Read more ›Ehrlich is a biologist. He studies animal populations. If an animal population grows unchecked, then it eventually outstrips its food supply, and the result is massive starvation. Ehrlich said that this would eventually happen with humans. Ehrlich said that it was only a matter of a decade or two until this mass human starvation would occur.
Well, it is now 1999. So far, all of his predictions of eminant doom have failed to occur. And, in fact, when one looks around, one sees that, in fact, the EXACT OPPOSITE has occured. Average food production, PER PERSON, is now higher than ever before! And people now own MORE MATERIAL POSSESSIONS than ever before!
And that's not all. Stores like Wal-Mart and K-Mart are packed with more things than ever before. Homes are now bigger than ever before. People have more cars now than ever before. The prices of resources like iron and copper are lower now than ever before, indicating that the supply of these resources has gone up.
Ehrlich assumed that humans would outsrip their resources, just like other animals do. But humans are not like other animals. Humans have the ability to create new resources through technological innovation.
... Read more ›