The Population Bomb was a major issue in the late 60s and early 70s, and it was probably justified at that time to be deeply concerned - but there were two vital errors in the calculations of the doom-sayers - They didn't predict the agricultural "
Green revolution" of the 1960s and 70s, which made global farm productivity massively greater than they expected, through improvements in both crop varieties and agricultural chemicals; And more importantly, they didn't factor in the effect of widely available, reliable and effective contraception that is controlled by women.
The agricultural advances delayed the problems by a good century or more; and the contraceptive pill eliminated the problem at source. Population increased by 20.2% in the decade from 1960 to 1970; in the decade from 1990 to 2000 it increased by only 12.6%, and the rate of increase is still falling - only
Demographic Momentum is still keeping the global population growth rate positive, and population will most likely stabilize at around 10 billion in the 2040s. The world already produces enough food for that many people, and we are not even close to the peak productivity possible from existing farmland. Indeed, as food production has soared in recent decades, the area of land given over to farming has been declining - particularly in the developed world.
Famine was a big deal in the 1950s and 60s; When John Lennon sang "They're starving back in China, so finish what you've got", he wasn't kidding - between 15 and 45 million Chinese people died due to famine in the three year period 1959-61. Even as recently as the 1980s, Bob Geldof was urging us all to "Feed the world", and his focus was the Ethiopian famine, in which 400,000 died between 1983 and 1985. That's perhaps two orders of magnitude fewer deaths than in China twenty years before, but still a lot of dead people (and of course, a lot more who survived in miserable conditions of near-starvation).
So, if overpopulation causes famine, then either the population of China must have fallen since 1961, and that of Ethiopia since 1985; OR those places must have even more severe famines now, than they did then. Well, we know famine is no longer occurring in either place - so we must predict that population has fallen - or at the very least is stable. Let's see:
China - Population 1961 - 660.3 million; Population 2016 - 1,379 million (109% increase)
Ethiopia - Population 1985 - 40.8 million; Population 2016 - 102.4 million (151% increase)
The hypothesis that famine is caused by overpopulation (or just 'population') is clearly and demonstrably false.
Now, can people PLEASE stop using this deeply flawed and demonstrably incorrect claim in their arguments?
Of course they fucking can't.
But it remains true that the overpopulation hypothesis - as described by the likes of Paul Ehrlich in the 1960s and 1970s - is utter bollocks.
Still, if food isn't a constraint, perhaps other resources are? In 1980, Paul Ehrlich, having been by that stage proven wrong in his dire predictions of a decade before, shifted to this argument in an attempt to salvage some credibility for his increasingly dodgy hypotheses. This led to the famous
Simon-Ehrlich wager.
Ehrlich and his colleagues picked five metals that they thought would undergo big price increases: chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten. Then, on paper, they bought $200 worth of each, for a total bet of $1,000, using the prices on September 29, 1980, as an index. They designated September 29, 1990, 10 years hence, as the payoff date. If the inflation-adjusted prices of the various metals rose in the interim, Simon would pay Ehrlich the combined difference. If the prices fell, Ehrlich et al. would pay Simon.
Between 1980 and 1990, the world's population grew by more than 800 million, the largest increase in one decade in all of history. But by September 1990, the price of each of Ehrlich's selected metals had fallen. Chromium, which had sold for $3.90 a pound in 1980, was down to $3.70 in 1990. Tin, which was $8.72 a pound in 1980, was down to $3.88 a decade later.
As a result, in October 1990, Paul Ehrlich mailed Julian Simon a check for $576.07 to settle the wager in Simon's favor.
So, in summary: The fears expressed in the intro to Soylent Green were not entirely unreasonable at that time; But even then, the solutions to the projected problems were becoming established, and four and a half decades later, we can see that those fears were hugely inflated, and that the things that rendered the concerns invalid are still in place and are still outpacing the growth of the underlying 'problem'.
Overpopulation is an outdated concern that no well informed person today should worry about in the slightest. So, as we might expect, a large number of people remain practically hysterical about it. Because whether or not the world has too many people, there is little doubt that it has FAR too few well informed people.
Perhaps the internet will fix that, but I ain't holding my breath.
