There is a fascinating website called “Long Bets.” There, people—usually experts—make specific predictions that will come true by a specific date. If somebody disagrees, the parties make a bet, with the proceeds going to charity. Current bets include “routine” commercial flights in “pilotless planes” by the year 2030 and that someone alive today will still be alive in 2150.

The goal of Long Bets is to “foster better long-term thinking” through “accountable predictions.”

If only it, or something like it, had been around 40 years ago!

In 1967, Stanford entomologist Paul Ehrlich began a magazine article by writing that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over.” He predicted that “in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now” to feed them. His article eventually became a book called The Population Explosion, one of the most influential books of the last 40 years.

None of Ehrlich’s dire predictions came true. People did die, but they died as a result of population-control efforts that were spurred by Ehrlich’s imaginary “population explosion.”

This story is told in a new book, Population Control: Real Costs, Illusory Benefits, by Steven Mosher.

Mosher played an important role in exposing the abuses associated with China’s “one-child” policy. In his latest book he tells us that China does not have a monopoly on population control-driven fanaticism and even cruelty. Continued...