Population Bombed is a lively analysis and rebuttal of the long and pessimistic history of population predictions and their implications of impending apocalypse.
I don’t come to the book as a student in the field, but rather as an educated, informed reader, one in fact, who is able to remember the publication of Paul Ehrlich’s influential book The Population Bomb in 1968. This new take on the issues is immensely revealing, and the scope of the review and the erudition of the authors is extraordinary.
One observation that feels just right, having been a biology major myself in university, is that team ‘Population Apocalypse’ (the pessimistic view) tends to come from the field of biology. These scientists understand about fruit flies growing in a culture medium but they know nothing about economics, and so they discount the effect of individual creativity and ingenuity and the power of capitalism to enrich our world.
The authors point out that for biologists it is the surface of the earth that supports populations, and they neglect the amazing power of bringing petroleum and minerals from underground and the contribution of this to the wealth of peoples, quite independent of hectares of arable land.
Set against the pessimists, the authors lay out the perspective of the population optimists, including the fact that the much-vaunted apocalypse has not happened – despite a doubling of the world’s population since 1968, humanity has never enjoyed such a high standard of living as we do now.
A useful analysis of the difference between optimists and pessimists uses the construct of Jane Jacobs and Peter Taylor of the ‘Commercial’ versus the ‘Guardian’ syndromes: think the Medici or the Rothschilds versus the Sopranos.
I was particularly fascinated to see the parallelism between the apocalypse narratives of population collapse, global warming, and global pandemic. In each case, the narrative is stoked with fear, and alternative, more positive interpretations are not permitted. Ehrlich reminds me of Fauci, endlessly wrong, but never acknowledging it and allowing no alternative messaging.
The climate change people are just the same. It seems that humans are psychologically prone to these ‘Chicken Little’ and ‘Sky is Falling’ stories. Our media lap up and spit out these narratives to sell their product – disaster stories merit clicks and clicks matter, so there is little incentive to consider countervailing storylines.
All in all, a worthwhile read that counters the doom and gloom of the population apocalypse pessimists with real-world data documenting the ongoing success of our population growth story.
-John Cunnington, MD
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Spitzenrezensionen aus anderen Ländern
Y. Cunnington
A lively rebuttal of the long and pessimistic history of population predictions
Rezension aus Kanada am 18. Januar 2022christopher m mathews
The connection between population growth and climate change are rationally debunked
Rezension aus den Vereinigten Staaten vom 4. September 2019
O. G. M. Morgan
An outstandingly well-written rebuttal of Neo-Malthusian claptrap.
Rezension aus dem Vereinigten Königreich vom 10. Januar 2020John Hickman
worthy endeavor
Rezension aus den Vereinigten Staaten vom 9. August 2019
