Stoat: Another advancement of science

Max_Planck_by_Hugo_Erfurth_1938cr_-_restoration1

The classic Science advances one funeral at a time refers; and I swear I have at least one other riffing on the theme. And today brings us Population Doomster and False Prophet of Ecological Apocalypse Paul Ehrlich Has Died. Wiki tells me that "statistician Paul A. Murtaugh says that Ehrlich was largely correct" but that is drivel. Michael Mann says he "was a friend and a hero. He will be greatly missed" and whinges that Julian Simon said Ehrlich was an alarmist purveyor of doom and gloom. Sadly, shortage of electrons - could it be anything else - prevents Mann from noting that Simon won the bet.

I recall in the dim and distant past discussing Ehrlich on sci.env; and, miraculously, Google Groups turns up this thread, started by Baby Timmy. And I find:

David Friedman wrote:
>In article <3cc1...@news.nwl.ac.uk>, w...@bas.ac.uk wrote:
>> >...I get
>> >an estimated world total deaths due to nutritional deficiency
>> >during the 1970s of 5,061,129 or a nice round five million.

>> Well, you've done quite a bit of work on that: thanks.
>> I'll go with 5M, until something more definitive turns up.

>But those aren't famine deaths. That's coming from an estimate of "deaths
>world-wide due to all nutritional deficiencies." Poor nutrition results
>in an increase in death rates long before anyone is starving to death.

So what. Its an upper bound. If correct, famine deaths were less than 5M,
and Erlich was wildly wrong (on this point).

Well, you've done quite a bit of work on that: thanks.
I'll go with 5M, until something more definitive turns up.

Which I think suffices for the distant past. My recollection of myself, at that time, was of being sympathetic to the kind of stuff the Ehrlich was saying - notice my parenthetical "on this point" -, but perhaps fortunately I was able to read what other people wrote; so many people can't.

I don't think I ever read Ehrlich. I did read the in-the-same-camp Club of Rome, and realised it was all wrong: they simply assume bad things increase exponentially but good things increase polynomially, and so even before the complicated modelling, those assumptions tell you that the bad will eventually overwhelm the good. Inevitably they plot bad-things-happening on a graph with time as the X axis; inevitably people read that time axis as meaningful; their defence is oh-dearie-me-no, the time is just expressive and so of-course-our-predictions-were-not-for-that-actual-time; but that just makes all the modelling even more pointless, because as I've said, the result is baked in from the start¹. David Henderson, in his My 1983 Memo on Population Growth, tells us that "This paper is premised on the idea that reducing population growth hastens economic progress. However, the author simply asserts the premise rather than documenting it" and I have a feeling that's true of Ehrlich's work.