For those who didn’t know him, Paul Ehrlich was one of the founding fathers of the degrowth movement. A movement which has, since the time of Malthus and beyond, declared that there are Just Too Many People and they’ll all die out if we don’t kill some of them soon.

Oh the modern degrowthers aren’t quite so bloodthirsty, the recent ones say we’ll all have to have less medicine and amenities instead of food and water, but the trajectory is the same. The idea remains that earth has reached a “carrying capacity” for humanity and we all must cut back on our standard of living for good.

Like all degrowthers, Paul Ehrlich was proven wrong very quickly after he wrote his book. In 1968, he predicted that “hundreds of millions” would die of famine in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet despite the continued presence of famines (Ethiopia for instance), reality never measured up to Paul’s lofty predictions.

Nor did we avoid Paul’s predictions because we accepted his preferred interventions. The international community never sterilized as many Indian women as Paul would have liked, but despite India now being the largest nation in history by population, the people there have never been *less* food insecure.

Paul’s predictions came false for the same reason most degrowthers are wrong, he didn’t believe in markets and technology.

It may seem “lucky” that our species has continued to produce ever-more food thanks to timely inventions. Improved agriculture proved Malthus wrong. The Fritz-Haber process destroyed the expected fertilizer shortage. The Green Revolution was already proving Paul wrong while he wrote his book. But this isn’t luck at all, it’s prices.

Paul Ehrlich and Thomas Malthus aren’t the only people in the world who can see that a growing population will need more food. They aren’t the only ones who can predict this. But in a functioning market economy, prices signal a way out of such a dilemma.

When people predict there won’t be enough food, the future price of food rises, even though supply and demand *today* are unchanged. That’s why (even before the recent kerfuffle), the price of oil would rise with every rise in middle-east tensions. The *threat* of there being not enough oil in the future can raise the price of oil today.

But again, just like oil, this is a market signal that encouraged new technology. When the future price of food rises, farmers can expect to make more money, and the people who sell them their farming equipment can likewise expect a share of the profits. All these people are encouraged to invest in future food-increasing technologies, in the hopes of landing on some solution that will make them very wealthy.

And even though most of these people will be hobbyists tinkering in their backyard, never making anything of substance, some people will invent say the McCormick Reaping Machine, greatly increasing farm productivity. Or some people today will perfect modern fracking, greatly increasing oil well productivity.

In either case, it’s true that without any sort of intervention, ever growing demand will outstrip static supply. But markets provide a proven mechanism for signaling the oncoming shortage and preventing it, through the incentivization of new technology.

I’ve seen modern degrowthers admit that Paul was wrong, he was so badly wrong in 1968 that they’d look stupid if they didn’t admit this. But many ascribe his wrongness to his racialized policy proposals, he wanted Earth to have less Indians and Chinese, but thought there were the right amount of Americans, for instance.

But Paul wasn’t wrong because he was a racist. He was wrong because he was wrong. And modern, non-racially-motivated degrowthers are wrong for the exact same reason, and they cannot escape their wrongness by simply divesting themselves of Paul’s racism.

The degrowth movement is fundamentally wrong about incentives, about prices, about predictions, and about technology. Anything that can be predicted can be planned for, as I have long said. And if it can be planned for, prices create a mechanism that reward people for mitigating it. If the price of food is expected to be high, the man who can make a whole lot of it will reap many rewards. Thus the man who invents the *reaper* will reap many rewards (*chuckle*).

Despite how wrong he was, Paul Ehrlich somehow maintained his status as a professional predictor, to the point that I’ve seen newspapers claim he was “early” and not merely “wrong.” But the famines he predicted never happened, and show no sign of happening now. The modern dilemma is how to get people to stop eating until they’re fat, not how to grow enough food to feed them all. And Paul’s wrongness should serve as a wakeup call for everyone other half-baked predictor with a book.

Don’t predict the future by infinitely extending the present. That’s the way of fools and bozos.