Paul Ehrlich

American biologist and demographer best known for The Population Bomb (1968), which forecast mass famine from overpopulation and became one of the most widely cited works behind late-20th-century anti-natalist anxiety.

Matters to this vault as the name Rachel Lu's 2026 Law & Liberty essay credits with inspiring the anti-natalism her own pronatalism argument pushes against — a demographic-panic-villain role this vault has already documented, for the opposite panic, played by the Club of Rome in the same venue's 2016 essay on China's one-child policy. Whether that 2016 essay names Ehrlich specifically, making the two essays a genuine same-villain repeat rather than two writers reaching for different figures from the same overpopulation-anxiety decade, is unconfirmed — see question-verify-clark-2016-essay-names-ehrlich.

References

• claim-lu-2026-essay-invokes-ehrlich-for-anti-natalist-anxiety
• observation-lawliberty-ehrlich-cross-time-villain-bridge-unconfirmed
• claim-clark-2016-names-paul-ehrlich-and-population-bomb

Updates

• 2026-09-08: The question this page's own body left open — whether Clark's 2016 essay names Ehrlich specifically, rather than only the Club of Rome — is answered. It does: "The alarm had been spread to a mass audience through the writings of Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome," and the essay further credits his The Population Bomb as one of two texts Song Jian carried back from Helsinki. The two Law & Liberty essays this page already connects are a genuine same-villain repeat, not a same-milieu echo. (claim-clark-2016-names-paul-ehrlich-and-population-bomb)
• 2026-09-14: Ehrlich's own account of his 1980 wager against Julian Simon: Simon privately admitted, in an October 1989 letter to Ehrlich, Harte, and Holdren, that his win partly reflected luck — a year before the public 1990 payoff. (claim-julian-simon-1989-letter-admitted-luck-in-ehrlich-wager)