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The population bomb Kindle Edition

by Paul R Ehrlich (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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Seminal work in population theory. Overpopulation is now the dominant problem in all our personal, national, and international planning. No one can do rational personal planning, nor can public policy be resolved in any area unless one first takes into account the population bomb. Schools, politicians, and mass media only touch the edge of the major problem. Ehrlich clearly describes our crisis in all respects--air, food, water, birth control, death control, and environmental impact. He also provides a realistic evaluation of our remaining options.

Print length

201 pages
Language

English
Publication date

May 6 2017
File size

17896 KB
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Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B071RXJ697
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 17896 KB
Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ Unlimited
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 201 pages

Customer Reviews:
61 ratings

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Top reviews from Canada

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Peter Milne

Understanding where we are heading

Reviewed in Canada on June 26, 2020

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Must read for those who are trying to understand the world today.

One person found this helpful

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Ianna

Population Bomb review

Reviewed in Canada on January 30, 2013

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This book is a must-read for everybody,

ahead of it's time but now it's time has come (for the masses to understand the concepts).

It's required reading for the sake of humanity but also for those who don't realize that the whole 'cataclysmic armaggedon' scenario is principally based on the need to 'reset' population levels and create a more consistent level of existance for all of humanity.

(which cannot be done by allowing the majority to 'breed' mindlessly while expecting the 'good life', which only creates mindless production/consumerism and environmental and quality of life degradation)

2 people found this helpful

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Santiago Rengel

Please google the "Simon–Ehrlich wager"

Reviewed in Canada on January 13, 2021

This guy has no idea what he's talking about. He couldn't make a good prediction to save his $10k, literally.

Written in 1968 about how the 70s would see mass starvation, this book is wrong on every single point it tries to make. Other ridiculous predictions that have shown this man to be an absolute crackpot include: 1) The UK will cease to exist before the year 2000 (for those keeping count, that prediction was made 53 years ago and failed to come true 21 years ago). Today, the UK is the 5th largest economy in the world, with no signs at all of food shortages or overpopulation) 2) The entire world will come to an end by 1985 (he actually said this). 3) 65 million Americans will starve in the 1970s...this one is particularly hilarious. Today, the poorest people in the USA are at a higher risk of being overweight than malnourished, food is cheaper and more plentiful than ever.

Peddling fear and doomsday fantasies is a terribly dishonorable way to make a living, Erlich should be ashamed of himself.

2 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Chicken Little wrong again(as always)

Reviewed in Canada on December 27, 2001

Ehrlich has made a 40 year career out of being flat out wrong.Every prediction in this book failed to come to pass.For some reason that is beyond me he manages to keep a good reputation,especially from radical environmentalist kooks and scientists who are greedy for grant money who will latch on to any alarmism in order to get those dollars rolling in.Ehrlich and Rifkin and the whole pantheon of the doom and gloom preachers are a discrace to science and deserve nothing but scorn for poisoning the public discourse and knowledge with their modern brand of apocalyptic thinking.But deep down a lot of people desire that an apocalypse is right around the corner.Whole religions have been founded on this type of thinking,like the hardcore environmentalist movement of present day America.Like all doom and gloomers Ehrlich will be forgotten 50 years from now,but of course a new generation of Chicken Littles will have arrived.

3 people found this helpful

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CKB

Human beings are not butterflies, Paul...

Reviewed in Canada on October 11, 1999

Are people STILL listening to this guy? If so, it has more to do with prejudices and uninformed--uninformable--paranoia than with scientific or logical merit. Ehrlich, in this seasoned tome, preserves for the ages some of his greatest nonsensical howlers about the catastrophic growth of human population in the face of vanishing resources and inadequate food. None of them was remotely close to the mark, but that doesn't stop people who so desperately _want_ our evil, soulless modern world to be brought down for its sins, that they cast aside failure of his models and predictions, and refuse to see that the world has debunked him.
Ehrlich's fatal flaw is easy to see and sum up. Sure, he was a biologist who studied populations, but populations of _insects_. And human beings--get ready for a shock--are not insects. We can innovate, invent, learn, and improve. I believe that that is something worth thinking about, even if Ehrlich does not.

One person found this helpful

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William E. Fleischmann

It can't survive hindsight

Reviewed in Canada on August 13, 2002

Paul Ehrlich begins the work that gave him instant notoriety (infamy) by saying: "I have understood the population explosion intellectually for a long time."
He spends the next 180 pages proving conclusively that such is not the case.
It isn't simply that his predictions turned out to be wrong in some of the particulars, but rather that they were so completely wrong that they will NEVER come to pass (though he unrepentantly continues to beat the same drum).
Ehrlich predicted that, by the end of the 20th century, human want would outstrip available resources; whole areas of human endeavor would screech to a halt due to resource scarcity; England would, in all likelihood, cease to exist; India would collapse due to its inability to feed itself; and "inevitable" mass starvation would sweep the globe (including the US). We were on the brink of disaster in 1968, and the future looked very, very dark. In fact, he asserts, "it is now too late to take action to save many of those people."
And yet none of these things have come to pass. Why? Because Ehrlich makes the same mistake that Malthus did: he confuses the concept of finite resources with the notion that they (and the demand for them) are fixed. This is the point that Ehrlich's detractors (most notably Julian Simon) have been making for decades.
Ehrlich did not foresee the technological innovations (the Green Revolution) that have been such a boon to mankind, or changes in both the supply and demand of various resources (such as those in his famous bet with Simon). But such changes were inevitable (far more than the catastrophe that he predicted). The entire history of human endeavor is adaptive. As resources become more scarce, their costs rise. As those costs rise, incentives are created to find alternatives or increase supply or decrease demand. Thus, assuming that either resource availability and/or per capita demand is fixed is not merely an oversight - it is inexcusably poor science.
This is also why claims that "The Population Bomb" was some sort of self-correcting prophecy - that by drawing attention to the problem, disaster was averted - hold no water. This fallacy is based on the assumption that long-term concerns about population growth are somehow more pressing than current hunger problems. Norman Borlaug (one of many involved in the Green Revolution) would have a good laugh about that one. Unfortunately, the major cause of hunger in the world today (in countries like Ethiopia) is not resource scarcity, but political realities (despots) that prevent access to food.
One last point to Ehrlich's defenders: much has been made about cancer rates (and Simon's purported unwillingness to bet on them). But a rise in cancer incidence was to be expected, not because of pollutants or chemicals or environmental degradations, but because cancer is primarily a disease of the aged. The population "explosion" did not occur because more children were/are being born (the opposite is true), but that children were/are no longer "dropping like flies." The average age of the population has risen markedly and so, of course, has the incidence of age related diseases.
My favorite example of Ehrlich-speak: "Enough of fantasy.... Just remember that, at the current growth rate, in a few thousand years everything in the visible universe would be converted into people, and the ball of people would be expanding at the speed of light."
I'm SO glad he'd had "enough of fantasy."

4 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

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L H

The population bomb

Reviewed in Spain on February 18, 2021

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Wery interesting....makes you think

Nicolas

Stupéfiant !

Reviewed in France on February 1, 2015

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Je m'étais offert ce livre pour lire pendant les vacances d'été 2014, alors que l'ebola se déclarait en Afrique... dont une description très proche dans le livre comme catastrophe mondiale...

One person found this helpful

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Frank De Munter

a suicidal world

Reviewed in France on November 11, 2014

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on the road to collective suicide, killing our own children along the way. "Homo sapiens"? Homo stupido! Read also Stephen Emmott's "10 billion" and wake up.

2 people found this helpful

Desron 449

The original world is ending book.

Reviewed in the United States on January 6, 2018

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The original book predicting that the world is coming to an end if we didn't listen to him.... then another, then another...all with predictions about what WOULD happen ...and didn't.... I'm an "environmentalist" with an earned MS in plant ecology so I know what is going on. He predicted that in the seventies we would all be living on artificial islands because of overpopulation....ummm no...so another book and more predictions. none came true.
The World Health Organization itself predicts NOW that the worlds population will stabilize around 2040 ....notice not collapse and that the problem is not "having kids" it is tyrants that won't feed their people.

30 people found this helpful

Renee M Williams

great read

Reviewed in the United States on February 7, 2021

Verified Purchase

the author was 100% wrong as to what the future (2000's now) would look like; however, the thing he has foretold could still happen especially now during this pandemic. I enjoyed reading the book and read it with quickness and ease. I look now at the authors lectures on Youtube that he give he is very insightful.

4 people found this helpful

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