In this episode Trent discusses how “prophets of doom” in the 1970’s got the issue of overpopulation wrong and how this parallels other modern mistaken alarmists.
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
I think some people never grow out of being afraid of the boogeyman. I think they start with as a kid being afraid of the monster under the bed. And, then it turns, and that irrational fear turns into an irrational fear of a future disaster that the evidence doesn’t actually support, that is just speculation. That evidence continually mounts against and against and against, but the person still clings to that fear. And, if they’re a person in power like a government official, then they can do all kinds of terrible things to people in the name of combating this alleged threat, which is far worse than if you just are simply as a kid, I can get that you’re afraid of the dark. You’re a kid. Adults should know better.
Trent Horn:
Today’s episode we’ll talk about a point in 20th century history where people did not, and bad things that came from that. And, the lessons. The lessons to be learned that as I talk about this, you might see some disturbing parallels with certain alleged disasters or problems that people freak out about now, when they overreact and the alleged cure that is pedaled is worse than the problem itself. So what inspired me to do today’s episode was on New Year’s, I think it was on January 1, I saw on Twitter, social media was trending. They were talking about the movie Soylent Green, okay? So, you remember Soylent Green from 1973? Charlton Heston dystopian film about the world’s overpopulated. There’s no more food left. Everybody eats these weird green pellets from the Soylent Corporation. And, where does the food come from?
Trent Horn:
Spoiler alert. How long has it been? It’s been nearly what? 50 years? So I think this is an okay 50 year spoiler alert, Soylent Green is people. So, the big twist at the end of the film is that they take all the overpopulated world, all the corpses, grind them up and turn them into food for everyone. They told people that the pills were plankton, but the oceans I guess are dead because mankind and all that. So that was Soylent Green, 1973, and it represented a zeitgeist at the time of being concerned about overpopulation saying, “Hey, the world, it’s going to be overpopulated. It’s going to fall apart. Humanity is doomed.” And, the Prophets of Doom encouraged some government officials, not as much in the United States, but in other places, to enact really, really horrible things as a result of that.
Trent Horn:
So I had noticed that in the New Year’s January 1st, 2022, what people are posting on social media was Soylent Green. This is what Soylent Green predicted the world would be like in 2022, polluted, overpopulated. It would be a giant mess. And, so then I wanted to write a quick little thing on social media to show why this is all bunk, and the dopiness behind the Prophets of Doom in the 70s. But, remember I decided I don’t want to be on social media anymore. Remember that episode? I’ve given up social media. Time suck. I’m glad I spent time with my family. Instead, I’ll talk about it with you here on the podcast. So here, let me scroll down. So, I found this article from the Washington Post recently. This is on January 9th and I was like, “You got to give me a break. Typical Washington Post.” The article’s headline is, in 1973, Soylent Green envisioned the world in 2022. And, it’s cut off here a little bit. It got a lot right.
Trent Horn:
Oh, good grief. You don’t want to talk about what they got wrong. This is the poster, the box art, for Soylent Green, okay? In Soylent Green, it says that in New York City, there are 40 million people. I don’t think it ever says the global population, but it claims that by 2022 over population is so bad that there are 40 million people living in New York City. That there are so many people they have to send out these ridiculous garbage trucks with front loader scoops on them to scoop up people who are taking up too much room and who are rioting. It doesn’t even give you an example of how wildly off that prediction is. I think in 1973, there was something like 7.8 million people in the New York metropolitan area. By 2022, that’s gone up to, I think like 8.1 million. So, it went from 7.8 million to 8.1 million in the span of 50 years, not from 7 million to 40 million people living in New York City.
Trent Horn:
So, this article by George Bass published January 9th, talks about it. And, so it talks about what did Soylent Green, maybe what it got right? I’m like, “Oh, come on.” Now, I will give you this. We’ll get to this in the article. Soylent Green did get one thing right, ironically enough. So I’ll talk about that, just because this was really a big deal back then. And, there’s a lot of parallels now with what some people worry about, and feel like we should take away civil liberties about for things that are irrationally fearsome. So, the article talks about 2022. Our overpopulated planet has catastrophic climate change. Mega corporations have excessive power. Clean living is a luxury only the 1% can afford. It may read like a scan of front page headlines, but these predictions were laid out half a century ago, in the dystopian film, Soylent Green.
Trent Horn:
Oh, give me a break. Our world is not overpopulated now. It’s not overpopulated. There are areas with high population density, but we’re experiencing demographic decline. There are areas in Europe, in East Asia, where there are not enough young people, and there’s a demographic winter. And, they don’t know, even in the US we’re worried about this with declining birth rates, how are we going to support an aging population of semi workers, not semi truck workers, semi like partial, part-time workers or retired people who don’t work, when there’s no kids to support them. Overpopulated planet, catastrophic climate change, clean living a luxury only the 1% can afford. No, standard of living has gone up for nearly everybody since the 1970s. And, global poverty, for example, has dropped dramatically.
Trent Horn:
You go back to the 1960s, it was something like 40% of the world still lived in extreme poverty on less than $2 a day. And now in the modern age, we have that less than 10%, that we’ve eradicated global poverty in many areas that were just being crushed by it. Especially the case in East and Southeast Asia, you can have places like Hong Kong, dirt poor, then opened them up to free trade. And, now there’s still poverty there and there’s overcrowding, but they don’t have the poverty that they once had 50 years ago.
Trent Horn:
So, now I’m ranting about politics and speaking quickly, my wife will be like, “You’re talking like Ben Shapiro. I’m Ben Shapiro, here on The Daily Wire.” So, it goes through and it talks about how older sci-fi films didn’t necessarily get everything right. But, Soylent Green, oh, look here. Look at this police force that is attacking innocent people. I love that the police in Soylent Green, by the way, basically wear painted football helmets.
Trent Horn:
So the idea here is what did it get right? Okay. So synthetic food, well maybe. Humans ditch meals for nutrition pills. That’s because there is no food for people to buy. A head of lettuce, two tomatoes, a leek are $279. A sliver of beef is the ultimate luxury. Except now, you have way more choices for food than you did in the 1970s. If you went in the 1970s to the store, compare that to all the different kinds of produce and vegetables and fresh eating options that we have today, and how much more affordable food is today than it was during inflation in the 70s. Well, knock on wood. We’ll see how long that lasts with the way things are today. So, no actually food prices, they’re more affordable now than they were before. Energy prices are more affordable. Well knock, knock. We’ll see how long that goes.
Trent Horn:
So, it’s true. Now we have more supplements available. We have more processed foods and those aren’t great for you, but it’s not like we ditched natural foods entirely. It’s just people’s lifestyle choices. They don’t want to shop on the outer rung of the grocery store. “Now, well there’s food deserts. There’s places that don’t have any.” It’s a separate issue for a separate time. No, there are ways to eat healthy. It’s just more convenient to do drive-thrus and not great food for you. Overcrowding, yeah, so it says here it’s overcrowded, traffic jams. A title card tells us New York City is 40 million. There are 2 million guys out of work in Manhattan alone, just waiting for my job.
Trent Horn:
There are similarities between the movie’s universe and life in the big apple today. Manhattan saw an influx of homeless residents last June. But, then at least it goes on to say crime isn’t as bad, because in the movie, in Soylent Green, it’s like 130 murders a day, whereas current it lists five over the New Year’s holiday in New York. Except of course violent crime has gone down, that’s another thing. You look at the 70s. I was watching a documentary on the mob, in New York in the 70s. That’s pretty crazy stuff. Violent crime is at an all time low.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, homelessness. There might have been an influx recently maybe because in New York, oh don’t know people weren’t allowed to have jobs that actually didn’t pose risk to other people, and had insane policies restricting work that drove people into poverty. That might have been a problem there. Oh, I don’t know.
Trent Horn:
So, going through trying to say that, except I love though, look at this. You’re a journalist, 40 million people in New York City.
Trent Horn:
I took me two seconds to Google it, that actually population in New York city has barely gone up. If anything, New York is now net negative, like California, losing people because of their bad decisions they’ve been making recently. Then we get into climate change. Except in Soylent Green it says the temperature never goes below 90. We don’t have climate change like that. Yeah, climate changes. Back in the 70s, people also thought that there was going to be a global freeze. No, I think climate change is a real thing, but you can debate the extent of it, how bad it actually is. How much do human contribute to it? But, to try to use the film say, “I got it right.” Well, no.
Trent Horn:
Here we go. Assisted dying, suicide, assisted suicide. Look, they even had assisted dying as a euphemism. There is a scene in the film when one of the characters, Sol Roth, played by Edward G. Robinson. “Where is your Messiah now?” He was Dathan in The Ten Commandments. Here’s a picture of him with Charlton Heston. He actually died shortly after the film came out, Edward G. Robinson. And, he decides that the world isn’t worth living in anymore. It’s all polluted. It’s terrible. I think it’s when he comes to realize that he learns that Soylent Green is people and they’re going to have to turn to cannibalism. So, he kills himself and the way he does it, he goes to this like suicide place, where they put him in a bed, and he gets to watch movies of what the world used to look like. And, he like, “It’s so pretty.”
Trent Horn:
And, then he’s euthanized basically. They have that stuff today. And, I think in where Switzerland, maybe, they have suicide pods, where people just get in the pod and they asphyxiate. And, they’re coming up with all kinds of ways to try to help people kill themselves there. So, that’s the one thing I’ll give that Soylent Green got right, that assisted suicide would be considered a norm, something that would be allowed and be legal. So I will give them credit. Soylent Green did predict this.
Trent Horn:
But everything else, they got wrong. Just like people have always been getting wrong, when it comes to overpopulation. And, I think there’s still people who argue that. They try to connect it to climate change. But, the Prophets of Doom, when it comes to things like overpopulation and other scares, they have been consistently wrong.
Trent Horn:
And, they never own up for the fact, and I’ll show you one example of that here shortly. But, this goes even way back before the 60s and 70s. This goes back to Thomas Malthus, a British clergymen. I want to say 18th century. I want to say 1798. I’m sure the article will get it right for me here. And, to give credit, this is published by Michael Shermer in Scientific American. Shermer is an atheist, but he is the former editor of Skeptic magazine. So I agree with Shermer when he gets a lot of kooky ideas wrong. So I give him a lot of credit for that. And, he wrote an article for Scientific American called, Why Malthus is Still Wrong. Malthus makes for bad science policy, May of 2016. And, so here it is. He says, “If by Fiat, I had to identify the most consequential ideas in the history of science, good and bad in the top 10 would be the 1798 treatise, an essay on the principle of population by the English political economist, Thomas Robert Malthus.” So, he is a political economist. I think he was also a clergyman.
Trent Horn:
The basic gist behind Malthus was he said, look, human population increases exponentially or geometrically, right? It doubles every few years, but food production grows arithmetically. We only can grow two tons of this crop next year, then three tons and four tons, but each year it’s 2 million people, then 4 million, then 8 million. And, so he’s saying, look, there is not going to be enough food, okay? It’s going to fall apart, and so we’re all going to end up starving to death. And, so Malthus said, look, human beings populate too much. It’s not enough food. We’re going to starve. It was a Malthusian catastrophe or disaster, is what people were predicting in the 19th century.
Trent Horn:
Now what people run with it is that in the middle of the 19th century, when Charles Darwin came up with the theory of evolution, when he discovered theory of evolution, you had social Darwinists who were saying, look in other animal kingdoms, all right? When there’s too many deer, the deer starve, and nature recalibrates itself. The weak deer die off. They get eaten by the bears, or whatever. So the social Darwinists said, look, we have to stop charity. We have to stop helping the poor, because the fact that we are not allowing them to die off is against the natural order. And, there’s going to be too many people and we’re not can have enough resources to feed everyone. So, rather let them die than they bring down the entire ship.
Trent Horn:
So it says here, Matt Ridley talks about this in his book, The Evolution of Everything. And, so he talks about how the English Poor Law created by Queen Elizabeth in 1601 to give food to the poor, was cut back by the Poor Law Amendment Act in 1834. Based on the idea that look, if you give the poor food, they’re just going to have more kids and make poverty worse. There’s a similar Malthusian attitude towards the Irish potato famine of the 1840s. In the words of Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Charles Trevelyan, that the famine was an effective mechanism for reducing surplus population. Then, you add people the Eugenicists, and these were liberal political advocates. These were people who said, hey, we need contraception, even though contraception had been considered wrong for all of human history, Judeo-Christian and outside of it, were saying, you know what? We need contraception for the poor, and that for the rich and the healthy only they mate with each other.
Trent Horn:
So it was eugenics, based on this Malthusian overpopulation fear. So this gave rise to forced sterilization programs. In the US in 1927, there was a Supreme Court case, Buck V Bell, saying that yeah, you can sterilize people against their will if they’re mentally unfit, because I don’t think this is in the reasoning. But, part of it is as we get in the 50s and 60s saying, look, there’s too many people. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once said, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” So then this goes forward into the middle part of the 20th century. And, the big turning point here was Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book, The Population Bomb. The problem here is in the 60s, you see population growth in China, in India, and so you have Ehrlich and the other Prophets of Doom.
Trent Horn:
There’s a great book on this, by the way, by Ronald Bailey. I like Ronald Bailey. He’s a libertarian science writer. I don’t agree with him on the pro-life stuff, because he is pro-choice, but he has a lot of other good stuff I really enjoy. He has a book called The End of Doom, published back in 2015. And, so Paul Ehrlich in 1968 wrote The Population Bomb, and he’s saying that the battle to feed all of humanity is over. He was saying by the 70s and the 80s that there’s going to be widespread famines, hundreds of millions of people would die. We’re doomed. We have to do something now to change population growth. We have to get to zero population growth, not just reduce it, but get to zero. And, this even continued. It says here Worldwatch Institute founder, Lester Brown declared in 1995, 1995, humanity’s greatest challenge may soon be just making it to the next harvest.
Trent Horn:
A 2009 Scientific American article said food shortages could bring down civilization. But, the problem with Malthusians as Bailey writes is that, and I love this, Malthusians, including Paul Ehrlich and others, even today who say with climate change, other things, there’s too many people. You have people saying, “I don’t want to have kids. There’s too many people. We need less people.” Here’s what Bailey writes, “The problem with Malthusians is that they quote cannot let go of the simple, but clearly wrong idea that human beings are no different than a herd of deer when it comes to reproduction.” And, then Shermer says, “Humans are thinking animals. We find solutions. Think Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution. The result is the opposite of what Malthus predicted. The wealthiest nations with the greatest food security have the lowest fertility rates, whereas the most food insecure countries have the highest fertility rates.”
Trent Horn:
So it’s not like, oh, if you have lots of people, that’s the problem. No, we have the technology. We have enough food on the planet to feed everybody. The problem is you have a lot of corrupt governments run by their kleptocracies that people can’t run a business. You could try to serve people. A government will take your business the next day, or a cartel, or a gang will take your business. You can’t get foreign investors to help you, because no one’s going to invest in a company that might not exist tomorrow. And, so you have these areas where we drop foreign aid to people. We’ll drop rice and beans and foreign aid and supplies, and the government takes it. And, so it’s a political problem, not a problem of numbers and people.
Trent Horn:
So, that’s why Shermer says here, I only disagree with one part of it. “The solution to over population is not to force people to have fewer children.” China’s one child policy showed the futility of that experiment. See that’s what happens. It’s like, oh we have too many people? You’re not allowed to have kids. That’s what China does. That’s what other people would like to do, did it is to raise the poorest nations out of poverty, through democratic governance, free trade, access to birth control, and the education and economic empowerment of women. Now, obviously I don’t believe in using something intrinsically evil like contraception, but the other things here, yeah. That’s what we’ve seen in other places, but it’s just mind boggling to me that people will latch onto this future fear. There’s going to be too many people. There’s not that there’s too many people now, or they might say that, but we’re on the wrong track. So we have to do anything it takes.
Trent Horn:
And, does this sound familiar to you? Your freedom doesn’t matter. Your freedom will get somebody killed. You think you’re free to just have as many kids as you want. You’re selfish. You are killing other people with your choices. Your freedom is not important. What’s important is saving lives. So if these policies save at least one life, then it’s worth it. Does that sound familiar to you? I want to share this with you. This is a video by the New York Times. It’s called A Retro Report, a video they did a few years ago called The Population Bomb. And, it showed Paul Ehrlich and others in the 1960s and 70s making these claims, and then the claims falling apart, but listen to the rhetoric. And, I think you’ll see, it’s very, very similar to other things that we hear today.
Richard Nixon:
Look at what the year 2000 will be. Our cities are going to be choked with people. They’re going to be choked with traffic. They’re going to be choked with crime. They’re going to be choked with pollution.
Trent Horn:
I love Richard Nixon, too. “They’re going be choked.” So, that’s Nixon speaking for those of you who are listening. He watches Soylent Green once, and it’s just like, “They’re going to be choked. There’s too many people. There’s too many people here.” And that idea when it gets people in power, that’s when it gets scary.
Richard Nixon:
And, they will be impossible places in which to live.
Speaker 4:
Paul’s picture of doom and gloom looked real.
Speaker 5:
Net world population is increasing by 23 people every 10 seconds. It’s clear that world population growth remains completely out of control.
Trent Horn:
Oh yeah. I love this, the evening news having a ticker of counting cases to get you panicked.
Speaker 6:
I bought it totally many. My friends bought it totally. I organized an event for 60 people to starve in public.
Speaker 7:
What were you trying to prove?
Speaker 6:
It’s about pain in the world. Maybe anybody who’s thinking of having a third child ought to go hungry a week.
Speaker 7:
The mode became don’t have kids. There’s nothing in the world. And, if your friends have of kids, it’s fine if they feel uncomfortable about that.
Dr. Paul Ehrlich:
We had formed an organization called zero population growth. And, then Johnny took me on the tonight [crosstalk 00:22:18]
Trent Horn:
And, so there’s Paul Ehrlich, the author of The Population Bomb. And, the thing is that he puts us out there and then media celebrity’s like, yeah this is right. We’ve got to be concerned about that, and they get the coverage from that.
Speaker 9:
Welcome, Dr. Paul Ehrlich.
Dr. Paul Ehrlich:
You have to get the death rate and birth rate in balance, and there’s only two ways to do it. One is to bring the birth rate down. The other is to push the death rate up.
Trent Horn:
There, see, that’s another bad thinking, false dichotomy, overpopulation. You either have to get the birth rate down. You have to forcibly put it down, or you got to increase the death rate. That’s a macabre thinking. Or, there’s a third option. You can become more efficient and create more resources so that you can have more people and you have enough land and resources to support them. And, guess what? That’s what we were able to do.
Speaker 7:
Did the show maybe 20 times, and we went from six chapters and 600 members to 600 chapters and 60,000 members.
Speaker 8:
We’re starting in. Now, this is the first step.
Speaker 5:
The Bagleys belong to a growing number of young marrieds who favor ZPG, zero population growth.
Speaker 11:
How many children do you have?
Speaker 12:
Two. I have two children.
Trent Horn:
So the idea here is okay, only two. That’s it, just for replacement level, and we’re going to keep it flat line. Whereas today though, you got people saying, no kids at all, or negative population growth, which actually you’re headed that way in a lot of modern countries. The other thing to watch for here that I’ve seen with others who are the Prophets of Doom, the utter hubris, the utter hubris of not being able to admit you are just wrong, and not willing to take responsibility for the evil things that were done because of your mistaken predictions. I just can’t handle it. So, here. Listen.
Dr. Paul Ehrlich:
Predictions do not necessarily come true. The critics go in and look at these little stories that won’t come true. And when they didn’t come true, say, “Ehrlich was wrong.” I was recently criticized because I had said many years ago that I would bet that England wouldn’t exist in the year 2000. Well, England did exist in the year 2000, but that was only 14 years ago.
Speaker 13:
But Ehrlich says it could still be just a matter of time.
Dr. Paul Ehrlich:
One of the things that people don’t understand is that timing to an ecologist is very, very different from timing to an average person.
Speaker 14:
How many years do you have to not have the world end to decide whatever reason you thought the world was going to end that actually, maybe it didn’t end because that reason was wrong.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. Well, England, it could still be gone. It was only 14 years I was off. This idea is well, it was long time spanse for an ecologist. Well, yeah. I could make a prediction that there will be a dramatic reduction in human population in the next 10,000 years. I mean, there could be an asteroid. There could be a nuclear war. Yeah, sure, if you allow yourself to have that far out into the future, sure. But, Ehrlich and others made very specific. It was not just like, well, it takes a long time. If they had just said maybe 200 years from now, the world would be overpopulated, you wouldn’t have efforts to try to sterilize people. But, it was the urgency. It was saying that, look, if we don’t act, in 15 years the world will end. And, you panic people enough like that. If we don’t act immediately or in the near future, a catastrophe will unfold. People will panic and they will rush to do terrible things.
Trent Horn:
And, then in hindsight, they will say, “Oh wait, that was a dumb idea. I guess we did that because we were kind of panicked and we weren’t thinking straight, and we didn’t take time to look at the data. And, then as the data came in, showing we were wrong, we were too proud to admit it, and couldn’t go back.” And, Ehrlich still can’t admit that he made a few predictions. He made his career on these specific panicked catastrophic predictions that didn’t come to pass, and left very terrible things in their wake, whereas there are other ways forward when we respect the human person to know that, no, we don’t have to support over population.
Trent Horn:
I’ll leave you with this story though when this argument comes up. One of my favorite stories, when I’ve done the radio show, the Why Are You Pro-Choice? radio show. I wish I could go back and find the clip. If I do, I’ll drop it here in the episode, but I don’t think I’ll be able to find it. It’s too hard to find. There is a guy who would always email my website every three months saying that I was a dumb Catholic because we need abortion because the world’s overpopulated. And, so he called the radio show once. And, his name was Randy. I said, “Randy, let me ask you a question. Let’s say you’re right. The world’s overpopulated. I think you’re wrong. Let’s say you’re right. What if not enough women choose to get abortions? Do you think they should be forced to have abortions?”
Trent Horn:
And, he said, “Well, no, of course not.” That’s not what they would say 40 years ago maybe. I said, “Well, why not?” “Well, because you can’t violate someone’s rights, even for something bad like overpopulation.” And, I said, “Bingo, that’s right. If you would not force a woman to have an abortion because of overpopulation, why would you force a child to be aborted? We should be concerned about threats to human beings, but we ought not violate the rights of human beings even to combat a threat against human beings, because it is better to suffer evil than to inflict it upon others.” All right?
Trent Horn:
So I hope this is helpful. I hope this is a nice little journey through overpopulation hysteria. Maybe we see it kind of repeating itself in other formats, today even. I would just say, “Look, when people make predictions of catastrophe, don’t panic. Look at the data with a sober mind and encourage others to do the same.” That’s what we really need. And never, ever promote evil to be done, even in the name of preventing other evils. One cannot do things that are intrinsically evil, even to achieve a great good. We must not do that. So, hope this is helpful for you all. Thank you guys so much. I’ll leave the links to some of these resources here below and yeah. I just hope that you have a very pleasant day.
If you like today’s episode, become a premium subscriber at our Patreon page and get access to member only content. For more information, visit TrentHornPodcast.com.