New post: a review/discussion of the anti-Israel, anti-Semitic, and anti-civilization activities at American college graduations…especially ‘elite’ college graduations.
Five minutes ago, people refused to shut up about overpopulation and “carrying capacity.”
Now people are getting upset about population collapse?
Make up your minds.
Paul Ehrlich hardest hit.
The Malthusians have been grousing about overpopulation forever. Technology in variety of forms has allowed us to increase the effective carrying capacity of this planet dramatically over the past century. Now a new group of doomsayers worry about population collapses. Of course we’ve also increased average lifespans and quality of life. It’s not a big surprise that humans tend to have less offspring when times are good. As technology continues to march ever on it becomes more and more difficult to understand the long term effects of how automation, robotization, and AI will transform civilization. There’s ever been a natural tendency towards pessimistic thinking whenever people attempt to make predictions about the future. This is nothing new. History suggests that humans have been convinced that we’re living in the end times for as long as we’ve existed. Millenarism in one form or another seems to be baked into our collective psychology. Clearly we’re all doomed.
In the last dan brown film inferno there was a tech ceo who had antinatalist tendencies in the book he succeeded in sterilizing humanity also the villain in the first kingsman a thinly disguised schwab manque most of the modern magnates the retirling buffett gates zuckerberg et al are antinatalist musk is a rate exception
Schwab was mentored by the real dr strangelove other figures like mad mullah mckibben have sowed this sentiment
Now is population misdistributed as to resources probably but thats a function of other policies
Progressive Academic Rejected as Choice for President at the University of Florida
“Ono was met with a lukewarm response from Gov. Ron DeSantis, a powerful voice in higher education, and outright opposition from other Republicans including Sen. Rick Scott and Reps. Byron Donalds and Greg Steube”
Good result, but DeSantis should not have allowed it to get this far. The academic world is a wasteland, and they need to look outside it for a president.
BTW what happened to Sasse? The only thing I’ve found is that he resigned “unexpectedly” last October due to his wife’s health. The NYTimes says he was forced out by the board of trustees. I’m surprised DeSantis has not cleaned house at the board.
I seem to recall hearing that Musk and/or other tech guys want more population, not because of the retirement Ponzi scheme problem but because more humans means more geniuses and more geniuses means more innovation.
I just want grandchildren one day…
“Humans vanishing” is an “if these trends continue” argument. They won’t. The people who are still having more kids, their kids will probably have more kids too on average. There’s people removing themselves from the gene pool by their lifestyle choices; the remainder will likely produce a growing population in the future.
The problem is not a long-term problem, it is a short or medium term problem and it is two-fold:
We are going to have to deal, very soon, with a top-heavy population pyramid, where there are too few working people to support so many old people. This won’t last long, and it won’t be pleasant, but it will be got through and it can’t be got around, because the math is what it is. It has little to do with, for example, how Social Security is funded: it’s about there not being enough economic production for the consumption, and so the lifestyles of old people definitely and maybe everyone else is going to get worse no matter how much money anyone has. There won’t be enough that the money can buy.
We are going to have deal with who the new global majority is. Birthrates are collapsing everywhere, but as Mark Steyn said twenty years ago, it’s about who’s the last one standing. Europe, for example, will no longer be European. China might well become partly Indian. Russia will become probably dwindle even more so than it has been doing. Japan will still be Japanese but a lot less crowded.
@Mitchell Strand:Five minutes ago, people refused to shut up about overpopulation and “carrying capacity.”
Now people are getting upset about population collapse?
Make up your minds.
Some people change their minds when the situation changes. What do you do?
People whose houses were on fire now have to deal with water damage after it’s put out. Guess they should make up their minds…
We were so unhappy about all the horse manure in the streets, and now we’re complaining about automobile accidents and the price of gasoline? Guess we should make up our minds…
The height of overpopulation worries, 50 years ago now, was just after birth rates had peaked, and it was largely about the Third World. While not everyone thought We Were Doomed, no one expected that the Third World would also see a collapse in its birth rates so quickly as it did.
I don’t think the overpopulation doomsaying was justified even at the time, but we are not in an overpopulating world now so at minimum we should expect people to shift their focus. Ehrlich himself is probably too old to do so.
If the trend continues it will lower the cost of houses. I’ve got my eye on one just down the street — it has four full bathrooms. Exciting!
The height of overpopulation worries, 50 years ago now, was just after birth rates had peaked, and it was largely about the Third World.
==
Paul Ehrlich’s book was published in 1967, ten years after total fertility rate and the raw number of live births had peaked in this country (NB we were about the most vigorously fecund occidental country at the time). If you look in the back of the book, you’ll see a mess of his recommendations for what-you-can-do did refer to activity in occidental countries.
==
I should note you can find articles by Ehrlich published more than 25 years after that where he’s still pushing the same demographic alarmism. You can locate one in BioScience, a publication pitched to undergraduates and science teachers which he placed there ca. 1994. His angle then was that we were in danger due to our consumption of the available net primary productivity. (If you get the article, you can see the sleight of hand about just what share of it we are consuming). Please note, this was about five years after he’d had to cut that check to Julian Simon and fifteen years after it was manifest that the scenarios he’d laid out in The Population Bomb were nonsense.
==
@Art Deco:I should note you can find articles by Ehrlich published more than 25 years after that…
Sure, like I said above, he’s probably too old to change his views; he however is only one guy and not the only population doomsayer; more of a popularizer than an originator. (He might be the last one standing if his health holds out.) The League of Nations sponsored a conference on overpopulation in 1927; the United Nations’ first population conference was in 1954.
At the World Population Conference in 1974 China accused the Western nations of using overpopulation hysteria to kneecap the economic development of the Third World; by 1982 they’d written the one-child policy into their constitution. Different people came to this way of looking at things at different times by different routes.
I recall a documentary film shown in my college film society in the late 70’s. They claimed to document some US or developed nation “charity” outreach efforts to provide free pre-natal and birthing services to third world nations some decade or decades earlier. Primarily Latin American nations, if memory serves. And purportedly, in many of those services women were sterilized without their knowledge or consent.
The Malthus theory is a classic gross oversimplification of how living, breathing, populations in the animal kingdom evolve. It may not be too bad a theory for dumb animals who consume and breed quite rapidly, but to extend it to include human populations is quite wrongheaded. And supposedly brilliant theoreticians have promoted this.
RE: DOGE and it’s findings–
Just today I ran across this saying, which applies just as much today as it did two thousand years ago.
“Thieves of private property pass their lives in chains, thieves of public property in riches and luxury.”
Cato the Elder
Despite a 10000% perfect record of being totally wrong over the last 55 years, Paul Ehrlich is still called upon to provide his views on population, climate etc.
This is really incredible.
“True Believers” are immune to facts or evidence. This is easy to do because there are no consequences of any sort to those folks believing the utterances of the charlatan Ehrlich.
These same folks, most likely, would switch their personal doctors or their personal financial consultants if they were provided wrong advice or wrong diagnose just a couple of times because they would be suffering the consequences of bum advice.
Unfortunately, totally irrational people vote,
As a result everybody suffers.
OT: today is the eighty-third anniversary of the first day of the Battle of Midway. Eighty-first anniversary of D-Day in two days.
“…10000%…”
Phew, now THAT’S wrong!
(BYW, have Paul Ehrlich and Paul Krugman ever been seen together in the same place?)
– – – – – – – –
And in other news, get ready for another scintillating book tour!!
That’s right! The one and only! Guess she needs to pay the bills…though doing stand up would likely be more profitable….
As far as “ independent” goes, she’s a regurgitator par excellence—that is, when she’s not making s*%^ up. She’s about as “independent” as a sea urchin.
A regurgitator par excellence—that is, when she’s not making s*%^ up.—I wonder if the Independents will take her… Has anyone ever been kicked out of the Indie Party?)
Sure, like I said above, he’s probably too old to change his views; he however is only one guy and not the only population doomsayer; more of a popularizer than an originator.
==
He was a biology professor at Stanford University who published in a variety of venues. Yes, he was an originator. So was Garret Hardin, another academician. The characters hired by the Club of Rome who wrote The Limits to Growth were also academicians. The principal author of The Global 2000 Report lived in the think tank blob.
==
On Ehrlich, the man was not yet 50 when it was apparent he’d misunderstood something.
Like Francis Fukuyama,
While not everyone thought We Were Doomed, no one expected that the Third World would also see a collapse in its birth rates so quickly as it did.
So, many fell under the spell of… sorry about this… implicit bias. The Third World wasn’t going to respond to relative prosperity the way We First Worlders did or they weren’t going to experience relative prosperity, because of reasons best left unstated (though maybe something to do with communism, which we can go ahead and talk about).
I am reminded that this blog used to be called NeoNeocon, and I used to read it as eagerly then as I do now – and I believed to my bones something approximately the opposite of the paragraph above: I believed that if the troublemaker nations in the Middle East just experienced a taste of Western life and freedom, they’d love it, want it, and change their ways to get it. I was not all that young, but certainly foolish.
The lesson I take from all this is that the effects – even fairly short-term, such as the “12 years to climate disaster” claims – of large and complex problems are more or less impossible to predict with any confidence. And therefore, when considering solutions, we MUST be conservative, like rock-ribbed conservative, or risk bringing about new horrible problems in our attempts to solve the one we see as most important at the time.
Well jeane kirkpatrick who was probably somewhat of a neocon thought authoritarianism better over totalitarian which was likely the consequence of a power vaccuum somoza pahlevi et al
Now that lesson seems to have been lost with saddamm qadaffi mubarak the jury is still out on assad the soviet system defaulted to a somewhat democratic system on the political sphere but oligarchic on the economic sphere which eventually discredited the former
Certain tropes like the population bomb the ‘cycle of violence’ made it around the world in short order within a generation
RE: Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Chris Mellon on UAPs and NHIs
This is a video which is well worth watching–
Chris Mellon is in the unique position of having been both a long experienced senior Congressional staffer, and the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, he has many contacts in, and is very much aware of how the DOD, IC, and government operates, and his is a very erudite, informed, reasoned, and articulate approach to the whole UAP/NHI Phenomenon.
In the linked video, titled ““We Are Not Alone”—A Reflection on UAP and Humanity’s Cosmic Context,” just out, he very brilliantly gives an overarching summary of the current state of play. *
+ Bonus:
“CNN HOST CLAIMS SHE PREPARED FOR US VISIT ‘AS IF I WAS GOING TO NORTH KOREA:’”— https://instapundit.com/723910/
Yep, it’s Christiane Amanpour…
The Russian has telegraphed his punch, which seems so odd as to almost be contrived. Putin, like a movie villain, gave a speech before actually firing his shot at his supposedly cornered enemy, who in the meantime may find a way to preempt him.
It seems what Putin is actually telling Trump is that they must let him recover some face if the West still hopes to salvage a ceasefire and he hopes the Western counter-counter strike should not be too severe. He wants revenge without escalation.
But Trump is not promising anything. He appears to be saying, “I’ll pass the message along, though Zelensky doesn’t always listen.” In other words, “I’ve done what I can do for peace and if you guys still want war then get it out of your system.” There is an appetite for war that has not yet been sated.
The fear now is that Putin, in his wrath, may retaliate with tactical nukes. But that begs the question of why they have not been used by Russia so far. The answer lies in risk. The uncertain course of the Ukraine war has given Kyiv a probabilistic nuclear deterrent. Putin’s inability to control outcomes implies that if he uses nukes, whatever his intent, then events may take an unpredictable course and there’s a chance it will spread to Russia.
Birth control pills, came into use early 1960s. Note that even some non-Western/East Asian places eg Iran have sub-replacement fertility.
The big problem with population decline isn’t the overall number. It where the growth and fall lies.
Its that the advanced, educated and civilised population is shrinking, whilst the uneducated, violent and uncivilised masses are not only growing, but being brought into western spaces at a rapid rate far exceeding the ability to absorb.
We have the modern day barbarians not only at the gates, but being bought in by the ruling class to pick their cotton and keep them in power. And those barbarians see no value in becoming Romans – in fact they see themselves as superior and the inevitable inheritors of power.
We really are watching the fall of modern Rome in real time.
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New post: a review/discussion of the anti-Israel, anti-Semitic, and anti-civilization activities at American college graduations…especially ‘elite’ college graduations.
https://ricochet.com/1826227/graduation-2025/
Five minutes ago, people refused to shut up about overpopulation and “carrying capacity.”
Now people are getting upset about population collapse?
Make up your minds.
Paul Ehrlich hardest hit.
The Malthusians have been grousing about overpopulation forever. Technology in variety of forms has allowed us to increase the effective carrying capacity of this planet dramatically over the past century. Now a new group of doomsayers worry about population collapses. Of course we’ve also increased average lifespans and quality of life. It’s not a big surprise that humans tend to have less offspring when times are good. As technology continues to march ever on it becomes more and more difficult to understand the long term effects of how automation, robotization, and AI will transform civilization. There’s ever been a natural tendency towards pessimistic thinking whenever people attempt to make predictions about the future. This is nothing new. History suggests that humans have been convinced that we’re living in the end times for as long as we’ve existed. Millenarism in one form or another seems to be baked into our collective psychology. Clearly we’re all doomed.
In the last dan brown film inferno there was a tech ceo who had antinatalist tendencies in the book he succeeded in sterilizing humanity also the villain in the first kingsman a thinly disguised schwab manque most of the modern magnates the retirling buffett gates zuckerberg et al are antinatalist musk is a rate exception
Schwab was mentored by the real dr strangelove other figures like mad mullah mckibben have sowed this sentiment
Now is population misdistributed as to resources probably but thats a function of other policies
Just putting it out there
https://x.com/KeenanPeachy/status/1929961418109137335
Of course any policy to restore norms is deemed to be abnormal despite positive results
Score one for the good guys, I guess.
https://legalinsurrection.com/2025/06/progressive-academic-rejected-as-choice-for-president-at-the-university-of-florida/
Progressive Academic Rejected as Choice for President at the University of Florida
“Ono was met with a lukewarm response from Gov. Ron DeSantis, a powerful voice in higher education, and outright opposition from other Republicans including Sen. Rick Scott and Reps. Byron Donalds and Greg Steube”
Good result, but DeSantis should not have allowed it to get this far. The academic world is a wasteland, and they need to look outside it for a president.
BTW what happened to Sasse? The only thing I’ve found is that he resigned “unexpectedly” last October due to his wife’s health. The NYTimes says he was forced out by the board of trustees. I’m surprised DeSantis has not cleaned house at the board.
I seem to recall hearing that Musk and/or other tech guys want more population, not because of the retirement Ponzi scheme problem but because more humans means more geniuses and more geniuses means more innovation.
I just want grandchildren one day…
“Humans vanishing” is an “if these trends continue” argument. They won’t. The people who are still having more kids, their kids will probably have more kids too on average. There’s people removing themselves from the gene pool by their lifestyle choices; the remainder will likely produce a growing population in the future.
The problem is not a long-term problem, it is a short or medium term problem and it is two-fold:
We are going to have to deal, very soon, with a top-heavy population pyramid, where there are too few working people to support so many old people. This won’t last long, and it won’t be pleasant, but it will be got through and it can’t be got around, because the math is what it is. It has little to do with, for example, how Social Security is funded: it’s about there not being enough economic production for the consumption, and so the lifestyles of old people definitely and maybe everyone else is going to get worse no matter how much money anyone has. There won’t be enough that the money can buy.
We are going to have deal with who the new global majority is. Birthrates are collapsing everywhere, but as Mark Steyn said twenty years ago, it’s about who’s the last one standing. Europe, for example, will no longer be European. China might well become partly Indian. Russia will become probably dwindle even more so than it has been doing. Japan will still be Japanese but a lot less crowded.
@Mitchell Strand:Five minutes ago, people refused to shut up about overpopulation and “carrying capacity.”
Now people are getting upset about population collapse?
Make up your minds.
Some people change their minds when the situation changes. What do you do?
People whose houses were on fire now have to deal with water damage after it’s put out. Guess they should make up their minds…
We were so unhappy about all the horse manure in the streets, and now we’re complaining about automobile accidents and the price of gasoline? Guess we should make up our minds…
The height of overpopulation worries, 50 years ago now, was just after birth rates had peaked, and it was largely about the Third World. While not everyone thought We Were Doomed, no one expected that the Third World would also see a collapse in its birth rates so quickly as it did.
I don’t think the overpopulation doomsaying was justified even at the time, but we are not in an overpopulating world now so at minimum we should expect people to shift their focus. Ehrlich himself is probably too old to do so.
If the trend continues it will lower the cost of houses. I’ve got my eye on one just down the street — it has four full bathrooms. Exciting!
The height of overpopulation worries, 50 years ago now, was just after birth rates had peaked, and it was largely about the Third World.
==
Paul Ehrlich’s book was published in 1967, ten years after total fertility rate and the raw number of live births had peaked in this country (NB we were about the most vigorously fecund occidental country at the time). If you look in the back of the book, you’ll see a mess of his recommendations for what-you-can-do did refer to activity in occidental countries.
==
I should note you can find articles by Ehrlich published more than 25 years after that where he’s still pushing the same demographic alarmism. You can locate one in BioScience, a publication pitched to undergraduates and science teachers which he placed there ca. 1994. His angle then was that we were in danger due to our consumption of the available net primary productivity. (If you get the article, you can see the sleight of hand about just what share of it we are consuming). Please note, this was about five years after he’d had to cut that check to Julian Simon and fifteen years after it was manifest that the scenarios he’d laid out in The Population Bomb were nonsense.
==
@Art Deco:I should note you can find articles by Ehrlich published more than 25 years after that…
Sure, like I said above, he’s probably too old to change his views; he however is only one guy and not the only population doomsayer; more of a popularizer than an originator. (He might be the last one standing if his health holds out.) The League of Nations sponsored a conference on overpopulation in 1927; the United Nations’ first population conference was in 1954.
At the World Population Conference in 1974 China accused the Western nations of using overpopulation hysteria to kneecap the economic development of the Third World; by 1982 they’d written the one-child policy into their constitution. Different people came to this way of looking at things at different times by different routes.
I recall a documentary film shown in my college film society in the late 70’s. They claimed to document some US or developed nation “charity” outreach efforts to provide free pre-natal and birthing services to third world nations some decade or decades earlier. Primarily Latin American nations, if memory serves. And purportedly, in many of those services women were sterilized without their knowledge or consent.
The Malthus theory is a classic gross oversimplification of how living, breathing, populations in the animal kingdom evolve. It may not be too bad a theory for dumb animals who consume and breed quite rapidly, but to extend it to include human populations is quite wrongheaded. And supposedly brilliant theoreticians have promoted this.
RE: DOGE and it’s findings–
Just today I ran across this saying, which applies just as much today as it did two thousand years ago.
“Thieves of private property pass their lives in chains, thieves of public property in riches and luxury.”
Cato the Elder
Despite a 10000% perfect record of being totally wrong over the last 55 years, Paul Ehrlich is still called upon to provide his views on population, climate etc.
This is really incredible.
“True Believers” are immune to facts or evidence. This is easy to do because there are no consequences of any sort to those folks believing the utterances of the charlatan Ehrlich.
These same folks, most likely, would switch their personal doctors or their personal financial consultants if they were provided wrong advice or wrong diagnose just a couple of times because they would be suffering the consequences of bum advice.
Unfortunately, totally irrational people vote,
As a result everybody suffers.
OT: today is the eighty-third anniversary of the first day of the Battle of Midway. Eighty-first anniversary of D-Day in two days.
“…10000%…”
Phew, now THAT’S wrong!
(BYW, have Paul Ehrlich and Paul Krugman ever been seen together in the same place?)
– – – – – – – –
And in other news, get ready for another scintillating book tour!!
“Ex-WH press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre claims she’s no longer a Democrat while hyping memoir of ‘broken’ Biden admin”—
https://nypost.com/2025/06/04/us-news/ex-wh-press-secretary-karine-jean-pierre-claims-shes-no-longer-a-democrat-in-teasing-memoir-of-broken-biden-admin/
That’s right! The one and only! Guess she needs to pay the bills…though doing stand up would likely be more profitable….
As far as “ independent” goes, she’s a regurgitator par excellence—that is, when she’s not making s*%^ up. She’s about as “independent” as a sea urchin.
A regurgitator par excellence—that is, when she’s not making s*%^ up.—I wonder if the Independents will take her… Has anyone ever been kicked out of the Indie Party?)
Sure, like I said above, he’s probably too old to change his views; he however is only one guy and not the only population doomsayer; more of a popularizer than an originator.
==
He was a biology professor at Stanford University who published in a variety of venues. Yes, he was an originator. So was Garret Hardin, another academician. The characters hired by the Club of Rome who wrote The Limits to Growth were also academicians. The principal author of The Global 2000 Report lived in the think tank blob.
==
On Ehrlich, the man was not yet 50 when it was apparent he’d misunderstood something.
Like Francis Fukuyama,
While not everyone thought We Were Doomed, no one expected that the Third World would also see a collapse in its birth rates so quickly as it did.
So, many fell under the spell of… sorry about this… implicit bias. The Third World wasn’t going to respond to relative prosperity the way We First Worlders did or they weren’t going to experience relative prosperity, because of reasons best left unstated (though maybe something to do with communism, which we can go ahead and talk about).
I am reminded that this blog used to be called NeoNeocon, and I used to read it as eagerly then as I do now – and I believed to my bones something approximately the opposite of the paragraph above: I believed that if the troublemaker nations in the Middle East just experienced a taste of Western life and freedom, they’d love it, want it, and change their ways to get it. I was not all that young, but certainly foolish.
The lesson I take from all this is that the effects – even fairly short-term, such as the “12 years to climate disaster” claims – of large and complex problems are more or less impossible to predict with any confidence. And therefore, when considering solutions, we MUST be conservative, like rock-ribbed conservative, or risk bringing about new horrible problems in our attempts to solve the one we see as most important at the time.
Well jeane kirkpatrick who was probably somewhat of a neocon thought authoritarianism better over totalitarian which was likely the consequence of a power vaccuum somoza pahlevi et al
Now that lesson seems to have been lost with saddamm qadaffi mubarak the jury is still out on assad the soviet system defaulted to a somewhat democratic system on the political sphere but oligarchic on the economic sphere which eventually discredited the former
Certain tropes like the population bomb the ‘cycle of violence’ made it around the world in short order within a generation
RE: Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Chris Mellon on UAPs and NHIs
This is a video which is well worth watching–
Chris Mellon is in the unique position of having been both a long experienced senior Congressional staffer, and the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, he has many contacts in, and is very much aware of how the DOD, IC, and government operates, and his is a very erudite, informed, reasoned, and articulate approach to the whole UAP/NHI Phenomenon.
In the linked video, titled ““We Are Not Alone”—A Reflection on UAP and Humanity’s Cosmic Context,” just out, he very brilliantly gives an overarching summary of the current state of play. *
* See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuyVlw4EOWs
Compare and contrast:
“How Columbia Hamas Supporters Led Me To Judaism.”—
https://instapundit.com/723891/
“Princeton Fails To Enforce Its Rules on Free Speech, Antisemitism.”—
https://instapundit.com/723829/
+ Bonus:
“CNN HOST CLAIMS SHE PREPARED FOR US VISIT ‘AS IF I WAS GOING TO NORTH KOREA:’”—
https://instapundit.com/723910/
Yep, it’s Christiane Amanpour…
A perspective from Richard Fernandez.
https://pjmedia.com/richard-fernandez/2025/06/04/belmont-club-putin-in-the-spiders-web-n4940464
Birth control pills, came into use early 1960s. Note that even some non-Western/East Asian places eg Iran have sub-replacement fertility.
The big problem with population decline isn’t the overall number. It where the growth and fall lies.
Its that the advanced, educated and civilised population is shrinking, whilst the uneducated, violent and uncivilised masses are not only growing, but being brought into western spaces at a rapid rate far exceeding the ability to absorb.
We have the modern day barbarians not only at the gates, but being bought in by the ruling class to pick their cotton and keep them in power. And those barbarians see no value in becoming Romans – in fact they see themselves as superior and the inevitable inheritors of power.
We really are watching the fall of modern Rome in real time.