Monday, January 9, 2023

Wrong About Everything Yet Still Celebrated

Song: The Flaming Lips "Race for the Cure."


As you might have heard, always-wrong Paul Ehrlich was on 60 Minutes, spouting his long-falsified views. I honestly don't understand why people listen to someone who has made many concrete predictions and they have all been wrong.

I don't want to rehash what I've written in Losing My Religions, so I'll outsource to one of the center-right people I read (and almost always the least-frustrating one). The entire bit is worth reading; one excerpt:

4/ Odd timing, again. The lack of good news or a plausible way forward in the segment is stunning. Again, some like Ritchie could have provided that. But nothing new here, I guess: The same year that Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, gaining massive celebrity in the process (including something like 20 appearances on The Tonight Show with host Johnny Carson), William Gaud, director of the U.S. Agency for International Development, coined the term “Green Revolution,” referring to the creation of high-yielding crop varieties, especially rice and wheat, that has prevented maybe a billion starvation deaths since the 1960s. And just two years later, scientist Norman Borlaug, the central figure in the Green Revolution, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. What’s more, the 2018 NER working paper “Two Blades of Grass: The Impact of the Green Revolution” finds that a “ten-year delay of the Green Revolution would in 2010 have cost 17 percent of GDP/capita [with a] cumulative GDP loss [of] US$83 trillion, corresponding to one year of current global GDP.”


PS: Can anyone tell me how Substack differs from basic blogging several decades ago? Sure, they make it easy to have paid subscribers, but it is just people sharing their thoughts online...

According to Ehrlich, I should be dead;
and if not, EK should live in a hellscape.

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