text: Paul Ehrlich may understand butterflies more than most of us do, but he definitely does not understand how the real world in general and the human society in particular works. He just does not seem to have sufficiently organized brain cells to think realistically about the world.
  
  This book starts with the bold statement that "he had understood the population explosion for quite some time". Nevertheless, the whole book proves that it's not the case. All his reasoning is based on the worst possible extrapolation of the worst imaginable short-term trend. His assumptions therefore include the "intelligent" assumption that there won't ever be any technological progress in the future; the climate will evolve in the worst possible way, and so forth. It's not surprising that he predicted that there would be mass starvation in the U.S. in the 1980s, and even when this was shown to be complete nonsense, he repeated the same prediction for the 1990s.
  
  Why does he - and people like him - continue to produce predictions that have been humiliated so many times by the actual course of history? It's because of their religion. Maybe they don't call it a "religion", but it is a religion nevertheless. Jehovah's Witnesses typically believe that there is going to be a judgement day. Because it did not occur in 1918 and other years for which it was predicted, they are a bit more careful and vague in their predictions nowadays. Malthus had done very similar errors as Ehrlich, but you may think that in the 20th century, people could know more than Malthus knew many years ago. But Ehrlich does not know more.
  
  In some sense, even Karl Marx himself could be viewed as a producer of catastrophic predictions. Marx predicted that something wrong would occur with capitalism as such, and it would be globally replaced by communism. (This is what I call a truly catastrophic prediction.) Marx was wrong, of course, because he completely misunderstood the magic power of the society and of the market to improve things that need to be improved and its ability to self-regulate and accomodate to new conditions. Ehrlich is repeating all errors of Marx and many other errors, too.
  
  But other people who have a different kind of a religious belief that we must simply be approaching a judgement day can't learn from Jehovah's Witnesses mistakes. Of course that Paul Ehrlich's reasoning has nothing to do with rational approach to important questions. (Bjorn Lomborg may be an example of a person who tries to solve very similar questions - namely these speculative questions about the long-term food problems - rationally.) Ehrlich confuses the total amount of food available today and the total production of food; he does not understand that the efficiency of agriculture can increase much like the population or even more; he does not understand that the growth of the population in the developed world would be naturally reduced if it became difficult to feed children, and so forth. He just does not understand the "invisible hand" of free markets and the visible hand of scientific and technologica progress and the power of human decisions.
  
  His reasoning could easily be proved wrong if he simply tried to make similar predictions about the past. But it was not his main goal to find a realistic prediction for the future. His goal was to write down pseudorationally sounding justifications of his religious preconceptions that would impress many people who are not exactly smart.
  
  The similarity between Ehrlich's predictions of mass starvation and the recent predictions of catastrophic global warming is not just a superficial coincidence. Find the book "Boiling Point" by Ross Gelbspan at this website - one of the silly recent books about the climate change disasters that expect us. Among the 15 mostly positive reviews of the book, you will also find a 5-star review by Paul Ehrlich of Stanford himself! The global warming alarmists continue with the traditions of Paul Ehrlich. It is still the same pseudoscience and people will apparently always believe this kind of stuff because there are only two infinite things: the Universe and human stupidity, and I am not sure about the Universe
  