Paul R. Ehrlich, the Stanford biologist who built a career on apocalyptic predictions of global famine that never arrived, died Friday in Palo Alto, California, at 93.
His daughter, Lisa Marie Daniel, told The New York Times (NYT) that cancer complications caused his death at a nursing facility. Ehrlich shot to fame after publishing “The Population Bomb” in 1968, a bestseller that sold three million copies and landed him on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” roughly 20 times, NYT reported.
The book declared humanity had already lost the fight to feed itself and forecast food riots across America and mass starvation worldwide. Beyond the book, Ehrlich went further, predicting 65 million Americans would starve and giving fair odds that England would not exist by the year 2000. (RELATED: STEVE MILLOY: Al Gore Got Climate Wars All Wrong)
Reality broke the other way. Smithsonian Magazine reported in 2018 that roughly a quarter of the world faced hunger when Ehrlich published his warnings. That share dropped to about one in ten even as the global headcount more than doubled. British economist Stephen Devereux counted four to five million starvation deaths in the 1970s, with warfare driving most of them, not overpopulation, the magazine reported.
Paul Ehrlich has a very deep hatred of humanity. pic.twitter.com/OiZwAgV3B2
— Alex Epstein (@AlexEpstein) March 20, 2025
Agricultural innovation did what Ehrlich said could not be done. Conservative writer Steven F. Hayward noted in a Substack obituary that Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution cut starvation deaths from 16 million in the 1960s to 1.3 million in the 1970s. Ehrlich’s book also landed at the global peak for fertility rates, Hayward wrote, and births have dropped steadily since.
Ehrlich lost a famous 1980 wager with economist Julian Simon over whether scarcity would drive metal prices up, NYT reported. Simon bet innovation would push them down. Ehrlich paid up in 1990, sending Simon $576.07.
CBS correspondent Scott Pelley told “60 Minutes” viewers in 2023 that Ehrlich “was wrong” and that “the green revolution fed the world,” Reason Magazine reported. Ehrlich still told the program that civilization’s end was near.
Ehrlich was born in 1932 in Philadelphia, NYT reported. He taught at Stanford from 1959, founded Zero Population Growth in 1968 and won a MacArthur prize in 1990. His wife of 72 years, Anne, his daughter, his sister and several grandchildren survive him.