The Long Shadow of ‘The Population Bomb’

Reversing anti-human doomerism will be a decades-long project.

The biologist Paul Ehrlich died last month at age 93, leaving behind his wife Anne Ehrlich, their daughter, two grandchildren, two great-children, and tens of thousands of cranks who still share his belief that humans are a pox on this planet.

In his 1968 book, The Population Bomb, and in each of the decades thereafter, Ehrlich pitted the number of children being born against what he perceived as the greater good, a view that still dominates too much of the popular discussion around marriage and family. Exhibit A: The New York Times, which in the days before Ehrlich’s death published a feature piece which worked overtime to stress that some find record-low birth rates “a good thing.” Not content to leave things there, the paper then ran four letters to the editor responding to the piece—all offering various progressive-friendly glosses on why a shrinking population is, in fact, good.

While Ehrlich’s “Bomb” never went off, the sense he introduced of a fuse dwindling ever shorter every time a baby is born continues to cast a Malthusian shadow over our contemporary discussions about birth rates and family life.

Today, you’re less likely to meet an anti-natalist in the wild than an a-natalist. “It’s so great that you want to have kids,” you might hear. “I could never.” Falling birth rates are chalked up to a bloodless shift in preference; people are simply choosing to consume more of what makes them happy, and kids have a hard time competing with that. As UNC-Chapel Hill demographer Karen Guzzo told the Times, “there’s been a lot of doom and gloom about the birthrate, but the decline is also a success story.”

To give this perspective its due, it is undisputedly the case that some decline stems from efforts like the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. In the 1990s, concerns about “welfare queens,” single motherhood, and “crack babies” fueled bipartisan efforts to reduce these trends, and those campaigns broadly succeeded.

Welfare reform, cultural messages, and a growing economy helped stem the rise of single motherhood that so concerned conservatives at the end of the twentieth century. Since 2007, when the U.S. hit “peak baby” (at least for the foreseeable future,) the birth rate has dropped about 22%. But that decline is far from uniform; marital fertility has remained roughly steady while births to single mothers have fallen by almost one third. This is a partial success, but the goal was to have more women tying the knot before giving birth. What we’re seeing instead is more women foregoing both marriage and parenthood altogether.

Part of this dynamic is driven by the well-documented trend of marriage becoming the province of the upper class. The Times cites research from UCLA economist Martha Bailey, who found fertility has dropped by 20% since 2007 for college-educated women in their early 20s, but by 50% for their peers with only a high school diploma.

Some see this as a story of female empowerment—working-class women, the Times strongly suggests, can now exercise the same control over their fertility that their more educated sisters have long enjoyed. The reporters note that “in interviews, many women talked about establishing themselves, getting a degree or a stable job, before settling down with a partner.”

But a key fact is missing from that triumphalist narrative. Non-college women are not on the trajectory to successfully delay fertility and family until later in life the way women with a bachelor’s degree have. Instead, they’re increasingly likely to never marry at all.

In 1980, about 9% of college-educated women in their 40s had never married. Forty-six years later, that figure has risen only modestly, to just under 15%. For women without a college degree, however, the change is far more dramatic. What was once rare—only about one in 20 never marrying—has become commonplace: today, roughly one in four non-college women in their 40s remain single.

This is hardly a story of empowerment or cultural success. It’s a sign that working-class women are becoming less likely to access the benefits of marriage and the stability of commitment in order to have a child. What looks like greater freedom at the top of the income spectrum increasingly reflects constraint at the bottom.

As the Manhattan Institute’s Robert VerBruggen has explored, the narrative that women are merely delaying childbirth, and will end up becoming mothers at rates similar to previous generations, rests on absolutely heroic assumptions that the real world will almost surely fail to meet. For some, rising childlessness may be the result of greater self-actualization; for many others, it will be an undesired pathway to a future full of heartache.

Despite all this, the notion that declining birthrates reflect increased autonomy continues to spread, Ehrlich or no Ehrlich. The four New York Times letters to the editor uniformly praised low birth rates—not a single published letter argued otherwise. They almost sounded like an AI bot trained on the writings of Ehrlich himself. Declining birth rates may not be a crisis, one writer wrote, but a “stabilizing force” against the peril facing our planet: “That’s not social decline. That’s agency.”

Granted, some countries are now distancing themselves from overt Ehrlichism. Governments around the world that imbibed a high-potency cocktail of anti-natalist propaganda are now, belatedly, nursing the hangover. In China, gone are the days of compulsory sterilization and forced abortion; subsidies for childbirth and child care are in. The state-funded campaigns that used to preach that “one child is best, the government aids in elder care” now push the message that “three children are best, no need for state-supported elder care.”

Ehrlich’s population bomb propaganda will forever be remembered for its influence on developing nations: “population planning” programs swept most of the Third World because neo-Malthusianism became the dominant paradigm for development work. But Ehrlich set his sights on the U.S., too.

In the book, Ehrlich mused about introducing “sterilants to water supplies or staple food,” with the government rationing out just enough antidotes to achieve the “desired population size.” He wanted Congress to raise taxes on families with large numbers of kids, to make them pay for their “reproductive irresponsibility,” and to hike taxes on diapers, toys, and other child-related products to make it financially harder to start a family.

Ehrlich dreamed of publicly funded grants and honors tied to later marriage and voluntary sterilization, seeking to use the state to accelerate a cultural shift away from family life and toward responsible, controlled procreation. In an interview after the release of The Population Bomb, he said the Federal Communications Commission should “see to it that large families are always treated in a negative light on television.”

While draped in quality-of-life platitudes, it was anti-human, anti-natalism all the way down. As the liberal family policy writer Elliot Haspel wrote at Unherd, “Ehrlich, in short, found teeming human life itself repulsive, and the lives of the poor, especially, as unworthy to live.”

Today, most of us—save, perhaps the editorial staff of the New York Times—can see that for the hogwash dressed in academic garb it always was. But Ehrlich’s work and legacy still allows commentators to greet declining marriage and birth rates with a shrug, perhaps noting an environmental silver lining to the demographic Ponzi scheme we are working ourselves into.

Ehrlich not only lost his famous bet with Julian Simon; he was proven wrong on nearly all of his doomer-ist predictions. Yet a glimpse around our current regime shows clear through-lines to the anti-natal utopia he sought.

We don’t overtly punish families with higher taxes, but we do ask them to bear the rising burden of raising children individually while socializing the costs associated with old age. Our approach to housing privileges the financial concerns of the elderly and the environmental implications on the spotted owl over the need to ensure supply grows to meet demand. The resulting high prices make more households hesitate to settle down and have kids. And we hardly need the FCC to sanction people who have big families, or formal awards to celebrate the decision not to reproduce; we have TikTok and the ladies of The View to handle that.

In too many cases, our functional anti-natalism is slowly turning Ehrlich’s dream of population decline into reality. What’s needed is an explicit political and cultural push in the opposite direction.

In the same decade that Ehrlich first rose to fame, Pope Paul VI outlined a different approach to birth rates during an address to the United Nations General Assembly.

“Your task is so to act that there will be enough bread at the table of mankind,” he told the delegates in 1965, “and not to support an artificial birth control that would be irrational, with the aim of reducing the number of those sharing in the banquet of life.”

Ehrlich hated him, devoting reams of paper to condemning the “medieval” thinking of religious leaders like the Pope. Today, too, our educated class is eager to rationalize why fewer guests at the “banquet of life” is a good thing. But instead of accepting that reality as just the workings-out of a global economy and better consumption opportunities, we must make sure that today’s young adults think about the implicit trade-off they’re making, whether they realize it or not.

An economy and culture that makes marriage harder to attain, and prioritizes delaying family formation until it’s fully on your own terms, will leave more and more young Americans unhappy and frustrated. The Population Bomb never went off. But we’ll be living with cultural damage Ehrlich could have only dreamed of inflicting unless we take proactive steps otherwise.