Paul Ehrlich died on March 13th at the age of 93.1 He was a Stanford biologist, a bestselling author, and arguably the most influential prophet of doom in modern history. His 1968 book The Population Bomb opened with a sentence that shaped an entire generation’s view of the future:

“The battle to feed all of humanity is over.”2

He meant it was lost. In the 1970s, he predicted, hundreds of millions of people would starve to death. The world was overpopulated. Resources were running out. Civilization was on the brink.

He was wrong. Spectacularly, comprehensively, historically wrong. And the world we actually got, the one he didn’t predict, tells a story he never had the framework to understand.

The Predictions

Ehrlich didn’t hedge. He didn’t offer scenarios. He made bold, specific claims about what was coming, and nearly all of them went the other direction.

In 1968, when The Population Bomb was published, the world population was 3.5 billion.3 Ehrlich argued this was already catastrophically too many. Today it’s 8.3 billion, more than double, and by every meaningful measure of human well-being, we’re dramatically better off.

Here’s what actually happened since Ehrlich declared the battle lost:

  • Hunger: Undernourishment in developing nations dropped from 37% to under 9%4
  • Food supply: Daily caloric availability per person increased by more than a third5
  • Life expectancy: Rose from 57 years to 736
  • Death rate: Fell from 12 per 1,000 to 8 per 1,0007
  • Extreme poverty: Dropped from roughly half the world’s population to under 10%8
  • Child mortality: Cut by more than half9

The world didn’t just avoid catastrophe. It flourished. More people are alive, living longer, eating better, and dying less violently than at any point in human history. The Population Bomb didn’t go off. It was a dud.

The Bet

The most elegant refutation of Ehrlich came from economist Julian Simon, who challenged him to put his money where his predictions were.

In 1980, Simon proposed a wager.10 Ehrlich could pick any five commodity metals. If their inflation-adjusted prices rose over the next decade (indicating the scarcity Ehrlich predicted), Simon would pay the difference. If they fell (indicating abundance), Ehrlich would pay.

Ehrlich picked copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten. He was confident. Resources were running out. Everyone knew it.

In October 1990, Ehrlich mailed Simon a check for $576.07.10 Every single metal had fallen in price. The basket declined significantly in inflation-adjusted terms.10

Resources hadn’t become scarcer. They’d become more abundant. Human ingenuity, technological progress, and market incentives had done what Ehrlich’s models said was impossible.

When Simon offered to run the bet again on the same terms, Ehrlich declined.11

The Refusal

What makes Ehrlich remarkable isn’t just that he was wrong. Plenty of people make bad predictions. What makes him extraordinary is that he never admitted it.

In two lengthy interviews examined by critic Dan Gardner, Ehrlich conceded “not a single major error” in his published works from the late 1960s and early 1970s.12 He later said The Population Bomb had been “too optimistic.”13

Too optimistic. The book that predicted hundreds of millions of deaths by starvation in the 1970s was, in his view, too rosy.

This isn’t stubbornness. It’s something deeper. Ehrlich couldn’t process the evidence of human flourishing because he had no category for it. His worldview was built on scarcity, entropy, and decline. The data kept saying otherwise, and he kept insisting the data would catch up to his despair.

He died at 93, a lifespan that would have been nearly unimaginable for most of human history, still waiting for the catastrophe.

The Missing Framework

Here’s where I part company with the secular writers who are correctly noting that Ehrlich was wrong.

They’ll credit the Green Revolution, market economics, technological innovation, human ingenuity. And they’re right; those are the proximate causes. Norman Borlaug’s dwarf wheat really did save a billion lives. Synthetic fertilizers really did transform agriculture. The price mechanism really does allocate resources more efficiently than central planners.

But why does human ingenuity keep outrunning scarcity? Why does the doomsday prediction keep failing, century after century, catastrophist after catastrophist? Why does the world keep getting better despite every confident prediction that it won’t?

Ehrlich had no answer for this. He could only assume the clock was still ticking.

I think there’s a better explanation.

The earth is the Lord’s. He made it abundant. He made human beings in His image: creative, resourceful, capable of solving problems that seem impossible. And He is actively redeeming His creation, not abandoning it. The Kingdom that started as a mustard seed has been growing for two thousand years, and the fruit of that growth shows up in falling poverty rates, rising life expectancy, and expanding harvests.

Ehrlich looked at a growing population and saw a bomb. Scripture looks at human beings and sees image-bearers: blessed, commanded to be fruitful, and equipped to steward creation.

The scarcity mindset makes sense if you think the universe is a closed system winding down toward heat death. It doesn’t make sense if you believe a sovereign God is working all things toward restoration.

The Lesson

Paul Ehrlich wasn’t a villain. He was a smart man captured by a narrative of despair, and he had plenty of company. His views weren’t fringe. He appeared on Johnny Carson more than twenty times.14 He won a MacArthur “genius” grant.15 He was treated as one of the most important scientists of his generation.

The lesson isn’t “laugh at the dead guy who got it wrong.” The lesson is that doomsday thinking is a powerful drug, and it doesn’t require evidence to maintain its grip. Ehrlich had decades of counter-evidence piling up around him, and he never blinked.

Christians are not immune to this. We have our own version: the conviction that the world must get worse before Jesus returns, that decline is theologically inevitable, that the only real hope is escape. It’s a different doomsday narrative, but it produces the same fruit: passivity, fear, and an inability to see the good that God is actually doing in the world.

Ehrlich’s death is a good moment to ask: What story are you telling yourself about where the world is headed? And does the evidence support it?

The data says the world is getting better. It has been getting better for a long time. Paul Ehrlich spent his entire career insisting otherwise, and the world proved him wrong every single year for fifty-eight years.

Maybe it’s time to update the narrative.