I had a girlfriend in 1971 who was assigned The Population Bomb in some (HS) sophomore social studies class and was very excited to tell me about it. She became seriously ZPG and did in fact never have any children. Neither did her two brothers, so her two brilliant parents from Nebraska ended up having no grandchildren. (Note to Jonathan and Ben - this was the girl who I competed with for a month over who could memorise the most decimal places of pi.) Erlich was on everyone's lips in those days, including enough career-first people, male and female, to have a significant influence on the fertility crisis which was already invisibly underway.
To be fair, he might have only provided a convenient rationalisation.
He joined the Prometheus Society in the late 1980s*, when it still had over a hundred members worldwide. He was fawned over, as was Marilyn Mach Vos Savant, another person with name recognition. He is perhaps the best example I have run across of what IQ is and is not. I don't know which of the several entrance requirements he met, but reading his interactions (he wrote no articles for the journal), he was clearly quite intelligent. Plenty of candlepower. But he was unable to deal with the slightest criticism and dug in immediately when challenged, often using condescension and credentialism as weapons. Some of his main assertions in the book had already proved overstated and perhaps simply wrong by 1989, but he gave not an inch. I did not have any direct arguments with him, as I felt my role as president required as even handed an approach as I could manage. He had not yet lost his famous - okay, nerd-famous - bet with Julian Simon, but his critics in the society were already pointing out that the was just about to lose not only lose the overall bet on the combined prices of five commodities, but on all five commodities individually.
I used the analogy of being physically powerful enough to forcefully twist in a screw that is cross-threaded to his ability to make an inaccurate theory look plausible by sheer intellectual force. I still like that metaphor and am annoyed that it never caught on.
*It not only still clings to existence with about forty members, but gratifyingly still lists me as a previous officer. Best figurehead honor I ever had. Amazingly, I am one of the longest-serving presidents, which is less prestigious as the last few have resigned or died in office with no visible diminution of cultural presence for the group. It will look great in my obituary as long as no one looks beyond the most superficial level of what, precisely, was entailed in this international power. Rather like being Winter Carnival King in 1970 or voted Most Self-Actualised in the year I barely eluded arrest. I think I have collected other worthless honors over the years. Dare I look any closer?
3 comments:
Steve Hayward also did an obituary post for Erlich. He debated him a couple of times and said he found him to be personable and willing to grapple with ideas. Not sure why the difference though it may have been the closer to challenging his predictions the more he dug in. Mr Hayward posted a video of his debate with Erlich on the old PBS version of Uncommon Knowledge.
https://stevehayward.substack.com/p/paul-ehrlich-rip
It may be that it is I who am grumbly and touchy.
I looked up when Mr Hayward was interacting with Mr Erlich and it was at least two decades after yours, and well after his predictions would have been demolished (to anybody doing a fair assessment, not the people who think his fatalism is 'premature'). In a post on Powerline, Scott Johnson identified the Uncommon Knowledge episode as from 2003 and the other debate was in 2006.
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