Tribute to an academic who lived his life in reality

In 1968 Paul Ehrlich was the rage with his book called the Population Bomb. It was a Malthusian rant that argued that "the battle to feed humanity is over." He yammered and babbled that India for example would not be able to feed its own people by 1980. He was so fashionable. He was so au courant. He was so wrong. One of his little ditties (near the end of the book) argued that "(We need) compulsory birth regulation... (through) the addition of temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food. Doses of the antidote would be carefully rationed by the government to produce the desired family size." Gee what a wonderful vision. Ehrlich, by the way, was qualified to write about population because his academic training was studying butterflies.

When Thomas Malthus wrote his Second Treatise around the time of Adam Smith, he had many of the same arguments - albeit they were some 200 years earlier. Malthus' thesis was that our ability as humans to procreate was superior to our ability to innovate. He did, for the time, a statistical analysis of population trends (one source says he got the data from Benjamin Franklin although Franklin died in 1790 and Malthus did not publish the first edition until several years later) which was fairly sophisticated. Unfortunately for Malthus, he missed two key issues - first his statistical model (which was based in part on US census data) did not control for immigration. The population growth issues were artificially inflated. But second, he did not anticipate the development of the steel plow which came along a couple of decades after Malthus published his book and increased the amount of land that one person could plow in a day.

Ehrlich evidently did not think about the history on Malthus. He also did not account for the work of a real scientist named Norman Bourlaug. Bourlaug is credited as being the father of the green revolution. He started his work in Mexico almost sixty years ago. The chart in this post gives you one idea about how effective he was in helping farmers around the world to increase their crop yield. He did write a lot of books and articles. But none of them were written for the common rube like Ehrlich's stuff. I once heard him interviewed and he seemed to be a very matter of fact guy. Here was a set of problems that he wanted to solve and he went about it, during his long career, to solve them. A lot of the political class were drug in by Ehrlich's apocalyptic vision but many more human lives were made better by Bourlaug's work. Oh, Dr. Bourlaug did warn about the potential dangers of over-population but he also worked on conscientious ways to mitigate the problem by producing more food.

Bourlaug died over the weekend at age 95. We could use a lot more academics who stick to the kind of professional dedication that he did over a long and distinguished career.