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Insect-ifying Humanity: The Paul Ehrlich Legacy
Nicholas N. Eberstadt
March 21, 2026

…There were no mass famines in the 1970s, nor have there been any since. Deadly hunger crises in our era are caused by killer governments (Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge; Ethiopia’s Derg; North Korea’s “Dear Leader”), never by Ehrlich’s “population overshoot.” But that is just a foretaste of how completely and utterly wrong Ehrlich got humanity’s future. In the decades since The Population Bomb, human numbers have more than doubled—from about 3.6 billion in 1968 to around 8.2 billion today. Yet in spite of the scale and the tempo of this unprecedented surge of humanity, the world and all its regions are dramatically, incontestably more affluent today. And despite decidedly more rapid population growth in poorer countries over the interim, global per capita GDP was over two-and-a-half times higher in 2024 than in 1968, according to World Bank estimates. READ MORE