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Title: Paul Ehrlich: Even Worse than the New York Times Says He Is
Source:
Weekly Standard
URL Source: http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs ... york-times-says-he_962990.html
Published: Jun 2, 2015
Author: Jonathan V. Last
Post Date: 2015-06-08 06:14:54 by Tooconservative
Keywords: None
Views: 1866
Comments: 11
Everyone is talking about the New York Times piece exposing how utterly wrong, willfully blind, and insanely dangerous Paul Ehrlich is, and has been, for the last forty-seven years. There’s video, too. This is great, I guess. Of course, it’s been obvious that Ehrlich was not just misguided, but an actual charlatan, since the 1970s. The late economist Julian Simon spent most of his career exposing Ehrlich’s errors. You may remember the Ehrlich-Simon wager. In 1980, Simon bet Ehrlich $1,000 that over the course of the following decade the price of a basket of commodities—any resources Ehrlich chose—would drop, as proof that Ehrlich’s ravings about the relationship of population to scarcity was wrong. Simon was correct. Ten years later Ehrlich sent him a check, with no note. Never prone to either civility or introspection—he frequently called people he disagreed with “fools,” “idiots,” “clowns,” and worse—Ehrlich later told the Wall Street Journal, “If Simon disappeared from the face of the Earth, that would be great for humanity.” Hell of a guy. Other people caught on to Ehrlich over the years. In her book about sex-selective abortion, Mara Hvistendahl has a long, devastating interview with Ehrlich in which she probes his errors, pushes him for accountability, and reveals him to be a doddering, foolish, old man wedded to a political ideology and with no interest in science, demographics, or even basic math. And Hvistendahl is a progressive feminist in good standing. (I spent a good deal of time on Ehrlich in my book on demographics, too.) And it’s not just economists, feminists, and conservative hangers-on who knew Ehrlich was wrong. Just about every serious demographer on the planet has spent the last 30 years examining the phenomenon of declining fertility rates, which may lead to population contraction. Don’t take my word for it, go ask the United Nations. But here’s the thing: Even in the face of all of this, the elite caste has showered Ehrlich with awards and honors. In 1990—the same year he lost his bet with Julian Simon—Ehrlich was awarded a million dollar MacArthur “genius” grant and was simultaneously feted across the Atlantic with Sweden’s Crafoord Prize, which was worth just about half a million. In 1993 the Heinz Family Foundation bestowed on him its first Heinz Award. This little trinket came with $100,000 in cash and the most delusional praise possible, claiming that Ehrlich’s “perspective, uncommon among scientists, has made [him and his wife] the target of often harsh criticism—criticism they accept with grace as the price of their forthrightness.” Which is a peculiar way of explaining that Ehrlich was completely wrong and that he responded to all such evidence with ad hominem attacks. Five years later, in 1998, he was awarded the Tyler Prize, which comes with $200,000. The money train kept on rolling. And it wasn’t just dumb philanthropists. “Serious” organizations continued to honor him. In 2001, the American Institute of Biological Sciences gave Ehrlich its “Distinguished Scientist” award. In 2009, the World Wildlife Fund featured him as a guest lecturer in their flagship speaker series. In 2012, he was inducted into London’s Royal Society, which is Britain’s nearly 400-year-old national academy of science. There is more. So much more. Paul Ehrlich’s entire career stands as a monument to the ideological imperatives of the world’s elites and the extent to which they exist not just independent from, but in actual opposition to, both science, evidence, reason, and good faith. The very fact of Paul Ehrlich is an indictment of the bien pensant progressive order. And the New York Times—which is only half a century late to the party—has nothing to say about that.
(1 image)Paul Ehrlich: Even Worse than the New York Times Says He Is
Environmentalism’s biggest clown and greatest monster.
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#2. To: TooConservative (#0)
The problem is that the leftist belief system is impervious to facts. No matter how much evidence there is to the contrary, nothing will change the fundamental beliefs of leftists. It's an amazing thing to me.
I think there is far more to it. Ehrlich, despite a record of failed predictions and hostility toward any fundamental precepts of the scientific method, has been richly rewarded for publicly peddling these favored "population explosion" scams for over 40 years. There have always been a slew of rich philanthropist types who gobble this up. People like the Rockefellers, the Ford family, Warren Buffet who funded many international sterilization programs - now ended, funding two competing population control groups, Zero Population Growth [ZPG] which was founded by Ehrlich and which became Population Connection in 2002. Bill Gates is another Malthusian/eugenics type with international reach for his foundations. The theme is pretty clear: no matter how wacky and wild Ehrlich's predictions are, his tycoon backers simply do not care because they want this message drilled into the public as much as possible, at least among key decision makers. However, I posted this for two reasons:
Because he wants to bring toilets to India or because he wants to bring vaccines against horrible diseases to Africa?
These rich guys are creepy about population expansion. Gates is like Buffet. They are the two primary population control nuts in the States and have been for years. Ehrlich and others derive their influence from these circles of tycoons that obsess over the hordes of the Earth overrunning their bank vaults. Maybe you should read that link about Buffet's "philanthropy" and why it became so controversial that Berkshire-Hathaway completely terminated its philanthropy. And consider that Buffet has actually folded his foundation into Gates' foundation when he dies.
No, they are completely different. Gates is a techie who stared his own company based on a vision of a world saturated with computers. Remember, this was at a time when IBM said that at most the world would need 150 computers. Buffet started in sales at his family's investment company. Both are smart guys, but Gates had a real vision of how technology could change the word while Buffet just wanted to make money. Gates changed the world. Buffet didn't. And they both made a lot of money. Gates represents everything that went right in American capitalism over the last 40 years (as did Steve Jobs, Micheal Dell, and countless others.) Buffet represents everything that went wrong, along with Goldman Sacs and the rest of the Wall Street crooks.
#8. To: cranko (#7)
Buffet and Gates are the same when it comes to their foundations. And they still do a lot of population control work, especially in the Third World. It's not like they bother to hide what they do but you don't read a lot about the programs they fund around the world.
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#3. To: cranko, Itzlzha (#2)
No matter how much evidence there is to the contrary, nothing will change the fundamental beliefs of leftists.
#4. To: TooConservative (#3)
Bill Gates is another Malthusian/eugenics type
#5. To: cranko (#4)
#7. To: TooConservative (#5)
Gates is like Buffet
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