Governments did not embark on the emergency measures to control population advocated by Ehrlich and many others. And yet mass starvation never came, for two reasons. First, fertility rates declined and the population did not grow as rapidly as predicted. Second, food production soared. Many experts had said these outcomes were not only unlikely, they were impossible. But they both happened, and forty years after the publication of Famine—1975!, the world’s population was better fed and longer lived than ever.
One would think catastrophists would learn to be humble about their ability to predict the future, but there is a noticeable absence of humility in the genre. In 1999, James Howard Kunstler wrote at great length about the disasters—including an economic recession as bad as the Great Depression of the 1930s—that would follow the breakdown of computers afflicted by the Y2K bug. Five years later, he published The Long Emergency, which is filled with great certainty about all manner of horrors to come. As for Paul Ehrlich, he has been repeating essentially the same arguments he made in The Population Bomb for forty years. On the dust jacket of The Upside of Down, a 2006 book by University of Toronto professor Thomas Homer-Dixon that follows similar themes, there is a blurb from Ehrlich. The book is highly recommended, he writes, for its “insightful ideas about how to make society more resilient in the face of near-inevitable environmental and social catastrophes.” Apparently the only thing Ehrlich has learned from the past four decades is to put the word “near” in front of the word “inevitable.”
To be fair to Homer-Dixon, his book is nowhere near as alarmist as Ehrlich’s writing, or some of the others in the catastrophist genre, although that’s how the marketing makes it look. In books, as in so much else, fear sells. Anyone stocking up on canned goods and shotgun shells because they’ve read some prediction of pending doom should keep that in mind. When Martin Rees wrote a book on threats emerging from scientific advances, he entitled it Our Final Century? But Rees’s British publishers didn’t find that quite frightening enough, so they dropped the question mark. Rees’s American publishers still weren’t satisfied and they changed “century” to “hour.”
In an interview, Rees is much less gloomy than his marketing. He says we should worry more about nuclear weapons than we do and work harder for disarmament; given that these weapons are actually designed to cause catastrophe, it’s hard not to agree. But Rees also thinks it important to acknowledge the astonishing bounty science has heaped upon us. “We are safer than ever before,” he says. We worry far too much about “very small risks like carcinogens in food, the risk of train accidents and things like that. We are unduly risk averse and public policy is very risk averse for those minor matters.”
A balanced perspective is vital, Rees says. There are real threats that should concern us—threats like nuclear weapons—but we also have to appreciate that “for most people in the world, there’s never been a better time to be alive.”
Proof of this fundamental truth can be found in countless statistics and reports. Or we can simply spend an afternoon reading the monuments to our good fortune erected in every Victorian cemetery.
Notes
As a journalist writing for a daily newspaper, I usually provide enough information in the text to allow readers to find my original sources with a quick Google search of names or keywords. In this book, I’ve generally followed the same approach. These notes are limited to the occasional instances where more information is necessary to find sources, and to provide additional commentary.
CHAPTER ONE
9: “The trends in humanity’s political arrangements are also quite positive. . . .” See Adrian Karatnycky, The 1999 Freedom House Survey: A Century of Progress, Journal of Democracy, January 2000. Note that in 1900 not one country anywhere in the world qualified as a full democracy according to modern standards of universal suffrage.
9: “A major study released later that year by the Human Security Centre at the University of British Columbia. . . .” See Human Security Report 2005: War and Peace in the 21st Century, Human Security Centre, Oxford University Press, New York, 2005.
10: “In Europe, where there are more cell phones than people and sales keep climbing, a survey found. . . .” See Eurobarometer/nVision, 2006.
CHAPTER TWO
22: There is only the brain.
25: “Psychologists found that when they asked students to eat a piece of fudge. . . .” Like many of the references to the work of psychologists in this chapter and others that follow, this is drawn from Heuristics and Biases, edited by Thomas Gilovich, Dale Griffin, and Daniel Kahneman. Along with the earlier edition of the same work—edited by Paul Slovic, Amos Tversky, and Daniel Kahneman—it is the definitive text on the subject.
30: “. . . if you give it some careful thought . . . .” The answer is five cents.
CHAPTER THREE
35: “Those who heard the higher number, guessed higher.” For the record, both groups were way off. Gandhi was 79 when he died.
38: “. . . produced an average answer almost 150 percent greater than a low number.” Psychologists Baruch Fischhoff, Sarah Lichtenstein, and Paul Slovic found another use for anchoring numbers in a study that asked people to estimate the toll taken by various causes of death. Without guidance, people’s answers were often wildly inaccurate, ranging from one extreme to the other. But when the researchers told people that 50,000 Americans are killed in car crashes each year (a toll which has dropped since the study was conducted), their answers “stabilized dramatically” because they started at 50,000 and adjusted up or down. In later trials, the researchers switched the anchoring number to 1,000 dead from electrocution—with the predictable result that people’s estimates of deaths by other causes dropped enormously.
43: “. . . as even many black men do.” For an explanation and tests of unconscious beliefs which anyone can take, see “Project Implicit” at www. implicit.harvard.edu.
52: “There is no ‘just’ in imagining.” Lottery and casino ads that highlight smiling winners are another form of powerful manipulation. The odds of winning big jackpots are so tiny that almost no one will be able think of winners in their personal lives. But by advertising examples of people who struck it big—often with personal details that make their stories memorable—lotteries and casinos make it easy for people to recall examplesof winners. And that ease of recall boosts Gut’s estimate of the likelihood of winning.
57: “. . . only family and friends will hear of a life lost to diabetes.” Much of the work of Paul Slovic cited in this book can be found in The Perception of Risk, a compilation of decades of Slovic’s papers.
CHAPTER FOUR
59: “. . . a conference that brought together some of the world’s leading astronomers and geoscientists to discuss asteroid impacts.” The conference papers were compiled in P. Bobrowsky and H. Rickman (eds.), Comet/Asteroid Impacts and Human Society.