THERE'S NEVER A GOOD DAY TO BE A MALTHUSIAN:

Last night, CBS decided to start the new year with a 60 Minutes segment on overpopulation. That's not really all that surprising. In recent months, many left-leaning media outlets profiled advocates of depopulation (here is The New York Times and here is The Atlantic), thereby helping to normalize their message of anti-humanism and anti-natalism. What is surprising is that CBS thought it wise to interview none other than the Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich. Ninety years old, looking healthy and sounding as self-assured as ever, Ehrlich revisited the main thesis of his 1968 book The Population Bomb. The book's beginning will be familiar to many readers:

"The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate..."

In fact, the world's crude death rate per 1,000 people fell from 12.9 in 1965-1970 to 8.1 in 2020-2025. That's a reduction of 37 percent. Famines, which were once common throughout the world, have disappeared outside of war zones. The world produces (or produced before the Russian invasion of Ukraine) record amounts of food. Hundreds of millions of people did not starve to death in the 1970s or thereafter. Quite the opposite happened; the world's population rose from 3.5 billion in 1968 to 8 billion in 2022. That said, some 400 million people were prevented from being born in China because of the misbegotten one-child policy (1978-2015), which the writings of Paul Ehrlich helped to inspire.

I realize that CBS has no time or space for the authors of Superabundance - a book showing that resources are getting more, rather than less, abundant. But why not interview Nobel Prize-winning economists like Paul Romer, Angus Deaton, and Michael Kremer, who never bought into the overpopulation nonsense? And if that's a stretch, why not interview smart Democrats, like Lawrence H. Summers (Bill Clinton's Secretary of the Treasury) or Jason Furman (Barack Obama's Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers)? They, too, argue that we do not have an "overpopulation problem." Or was 60 Minutes only looking for scholars willing to confirm the pre-determined narrative of doom and gloom?

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