The World’s Wrongest Man

There’s A Job Opening

In case you missed it, Paul R. Ehrich passed away on March 13, 2026, at the age of 93. Ehrlich is famous for a number of reasons. He developed the I=PAT formula with John Holdren, which expressed human environmental impact. He was also a renowned expert on butterflies, leading groundbreaking research on population dynamics and evolution, and was a founder of the field of modern population biology.

Oh ya, he was arguably the world’s wrongest man.

You see Ehrlich also wrote the bestseller The Population Bomb (1968) which predicted worldwide famines due to overpopulation, as well as other major societal upheavals. Here is one example of his foresight:

“The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

His ability to be wrong was not limited to his bestseller as he proved in a speech in 1971: “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” He also predicted that the U.S. would be rationing water by 1974, and food by 1980, that smog in L.A. and New York would cause some 200,000 deaths per year and that Americans born after World War II wouldn’t live past 50.

Oopsie. There’s no harm in being wrong though, right?

Except Ehrlich’s predictions helped usher in the “Zero Population Growth” movement in the U.S which contributed to a significant decline in the U.S. fertility rate from 3.4 in the early 1960s to 1.8 by 1975. It has also been accused of leading to millions of sterilizations in China, India, Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and elsewhere.

So, in a way, you can thank Ehrlich for all the “we need illegal immigrants” argument. Fortunately for us, no less than the “Old Gray Lady” stepped up to set the record straight.

Wait, what? “Premature?” I don’t think that’s a synonym for “wrong,” is it? Where have I heard this sort of apologetic, fawning type of excuse for being wrong before? Oh ya, here is Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher commenting on Trotsky being wrong about... well, everything: “Proof of Trotsky’s farsightedness is that none of his predictions have come true yet.”

Wow! He saw so far into the future that not enough time has passed for any of his predictions to come true yet. Bravo! Chef’s kiss.

“Premature” is the word environmentalists use for “wrong” because the latter word is so... final.

“Premature” allows environmentalists to remain hopeful that eventually “hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.” Keep the dream alive, comrades! Sadly, Ehrlich will not be around to say, “I told you so.” Neither will any of us, for that matter, because he’s wrong. However, his death does leave us with a big hole to fill. Specifically...

Who is the new World’s Wrongest Person?

I have a few nominations:

• Al Gore, who claimed:

  • By 2016 “there will be no more snows of Kilimanjaro.”

  • In 2007 he stated that the North Polar ice cap “could be completely gone during summer in less than 22 years. Another new study… warns it could happen in as little as 7 years.

  • December 2009 Copenhagen speech: “Some of the models suggest… there is a 75% chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during some of the summer months, could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years.”

• Greta Thunberg has claimed:

  • On June 21, 2018, Thunberg tweeted: “A top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years.”

Let’s not limit this to environmentalists:

• Paul Krugman (Nobel Prize winning economist):

  • Wrote that by around 2005, the internet’s impact on the economy would be no greater than the fax machine.

  • On election night in 2016, he suggested markets might never recover from a Trump victory.

• Donald Trump:

  • “I will build a great, great wall on our southern border and I will have Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.”

  • “Over the next couple of years, I think we’ll … be cutting income tax — could be almost completely cutting it, because the money we’re taking in is going to be so large… It’s so enormous that you’re not going to have income tax to pay.”

  • “Jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country, and you see it happening already.

  • Note: Ya, ya, I just pissed off all the Trumpites. Deal with it.

I think that there is a very good chance that the AI doomers and AI utopians are making predictions so wrong that they may will make Ehrlich’s mistakes look minor. Sadly, we will have to wait a few years to see if they or I am correct. I’m pulling for the utopians.

Some will argue that I should include Anthony Fauci on this list because he was wrong about COVID in so many ways. However, he wasn’t terrible at predictions so much as lying to cover up his involvement in what was obviously a lab leak.

Note: I’m not opposed to awarding this to an organization, so The Club of Rome, for example might be in the running for the title.

Who do you think deserves Ehrlich’s title? Make your nominations in the comments below.

Phil is a freelance writer, Canadian Navy veteran, and classical liberal. He has lived and worked in both Canada and the United States and currently resides in Vancouver, British Columbia where he writes on politics, individual rights, free speech, and anything else that catches his fancy.

As you may have picked up from this article he’s now trying his hand at humor. You can find some of what he finds funny here.

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