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What Religious Liberty?
The Incredible Ever-Expanding Dead End
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Whose Values in Education?
Toppling Dominos
Anti-Christians don't have to be Hypocrites but Many Volunteer
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The Emperor's Clothes or a Cheap Tuxedo
The Myth of Hitler's Pope, Part I
The Myth of Hitler's Pope, Part II
Embryonic Stem Cell Research Again
The Madness of Secularism
"Don't Impose Your Religion on Me"
Dictatorship of Relativism
Two Babies at Christmas
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Christians Losing America
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Who Killed Jesus?
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You've Come a Long Way, Baby
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Things Your Media Never Told You
A Nasty Little Secret
Two Points of View on the Birth of Jesus
You Gotta Kill Them.  How Else Are They Going To Learn?
Perplexing Christmas Questions
How Do You See Christ Today?
Now that there is Another Ewe, will there be Another You?
What is Conscience Anyhow?
Divorce of Love and Life
What Counts as a Mass?
What is a Covenant?
I Wish I had Your Faith
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Dutch Treats
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Good Morality or Good Medicine
Generation-X'ers Smart in Every Way But One
A Matter of Good Breeding
Herod and Pontius Pilate at the Polls
Hitler's Pope or Righteous Gentile?
The Unknown God
What exactly is wrong with homosexuality?
Ideology Trumps Science, Reality, and Common Sense
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Infallibility and Error in the Church
Pilate Asked, "What is Truth?"
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Choice of Language and Language of Choice
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Many are Wed but Few are Married
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A Useful Lie
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Religious Persecution in the U.S.?
What Makes a Person a Person?
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Pearl of Great Price
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Sexual Morality Irrelevant in Judging Public Officials?
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SOSSLQ's, not POSSLQ's
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Why Attend Mass Every Sunday?
Is it All Right to Pull the Plug?
An Appeal for Intolerance
Topics Catechetical
A Voting Catechism
A Moral Guide to Voting
Vouchers: Has Their Time Come?
What Child is This?
What did they die of?
You are the Man
You may be a liberal if...
Get Rid of that Worthless Relative
Planned Un-Parenthood
Weighing Pro-Life Issues Prior to Voting

by Monsignor James C. Brunner

Faith Points

Would you buy stock on the advice of an analyst who never made a correct prediction about the direction of the market or individual securities? Would you think his prediction system was scientifically established? Before you snort, "Of course not!" consider the case of Paul Ehrlich. He has had a successful career predicting the demise of the human race because of overpopulation. Here is a partial list of his predictions and their outcome:

1. Prediction: The battle to feed humanity has been lost. In the 1970’s hundreds of millions of people (including Americans) will starve to death. Fact: There have been only isolated instances of famine brought on mainly by political upheavals and unusual weather conditions. Fewer people die of starvation than in other ages when the population was lower. Food production is well ahead of population growth and hundreds of thousands of Americans are dying, not of starvation, but of obesity. A hydroponic farm of 1-acre using artificial light produces a ton of food a day, enough to feed a thousand people.

2. Prediction: Human-induced land degradation affects 40% of the world’s vegetative surface, is accelerating everywhere, and will reduce crop yields. Fact: We harvest more grain per acre than thirty years ago, e.g., 50% more corn. It is feasible with present technology to raise crop yields from 1.2 tons per acre to 6 to 9 without considering genetics advances. That means that with present technology and land utilization the world can support 6-7 times the present population. We have paid farmers not to grow grain and, on reduced acreage, they produced enough grain to force the government to phase out price subsidies because of their effects on the budget deficit. Sound farming methods are millions of times more efficient than land use by early humans.

3. Prediction: Since natural resources are finite, increased consumption must inevitably lead to depletion and scarcity. These scarcities will occur before 1985. Fact: Minerals can be and are being recycled. In rare cases of scarcity such as copper other and better materials are substituted. Copper telephone wiring is a dying technology. Fiber optics made of sand now carry greater message loads than copper ever could. Without measuring, it is safe to say that we have a billion-year reserve of sand. There are no key minerals facing depletion and they are cheaper relative to the Consumer Price Index or wages.

4. Prediction: "I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2,000." (1969) Fact: England’s prospects look good for it to hold out two more years.

5. Prediction: Smog disasters might produce 200,000 corpses in 1973 in New York and Los Angeles. Fact: Our air is cleaner than it was forty years ago.

6. Prediction: We will run out of oil. Fact: Thirty years ago estimates of oil reserves were about 30 years. Today they are up to 45. Pretax oil prices are the cheapest ever.

And so it goes. One would think that Mr. Ehrlich’s miserable prediction record would embarrass him and that his alarmist nonsense would earn for him the same snickers reserved for the eccentrics of the Flat Earth Society. Not so. He is showered with accolades. He received a $345,000 check from the MacArthur Foundation’s "genius award" and split a Swedish Royal Academy of Science prize worth $120,000. I think he deserves the PP Award (not Planned Parenthood, but Preposterous Prognosticator) and I will bestow it on him if he accepts my bet for $345,000 that England will exist in the year 2000.

It is useful to see why someone who speaks like a village idiot is taken for a sober scientist and savant. Mr. Ehrlich is a neo-Malthusian. The name comes from an English clergyman, Robert T. Malthus, who wrote an essay in 1798 wherein he argued that human population would increase geometrically while food supply at best can increase arithmetically. Thus given 100 people in year one the population will increase in succeeding years to 200; 400; 800; 1,600; 3,200; 6,400; 12,800; 25,600; 51,200; 102,400, etc. Meanwhile food supplies adequate for 100 in year one will increase only to 200; 300; 400; 500; 600; 700; 800; 900; and 1,000. So in year 10 only enough food to feed 1,000 persons will be available for a population that will have grown to 102,400. How did Malthus come to this conclusion? He read about goats in the Galapagos that multiplied and soon ate practically all vegetation on the island. For no valid reason he assumed that the same thing would occur to humans in the world. They would multiply limitlessly, outstripping food resources, and starve to death. Only wars, famines, disease, or coercion can stop the growth of human population. These calamities were for Malthus really blessings because they postponed humanity’s inevitable doom. He advocated increasing the mortality rate of the poor.

His paradigm is a tissue of errors. The unique situation of the Galapagos does not represent the world. Humans are not like goats either in their sexual activity or dependence upon available food. It has never been true that humans have multiplied in geometric progression and, as long as they are not hampered by unjust social systems, they have produced food in abundance. When Malthus wrote technology had not been applied to agriculture as it is today. It was illogical of Malthus to treat things that are variables as straight-line constants. As a scientific hypothesis Malthusianism is a total failure because, instead of being predictive, it has been contradicted by 200 plus years of experience. Poverty is not caused by overpopulation but overpopulation by poverty. Without resources (in developing countries 80% of all agricultural lands are owned by 3% of the population) the only creative activity available to the poor is reproduction and fulfillment of hope in their children. Many children are needed because of loss to disease and in order to guarantee some hope of support for the parents in their old age. When personal income rises birth rates fall.

In later writings Malthus abandoned his earlier theory and no longer qualified as a Malthusian. Others embraced his first essay with great fervor and the idea that population growth brings poverty and eventual starvation guides public policy to this day. Millions of foreign aid dollars are not for food or better production methods but for birth control and abortion programs. Politicians are convinced it is scientific truth that populations, especially of the poor, must be diminished by any means.

The chief appeal of Malthusianism is as a control device for actual or self-appointed elites. It is a nasty, inhuman principle masquerading as humanitarianism. It was a big hit with the English aristocracy and industrialists who were exploiting the poor, including children, with miserable working conditions and wages. They could blame the victims for their misery without the disadvantage of paying them a living wage. Not helping them was doing them a favor–it would "decrease the surplus population" as Scrooge said. The need for a place to dump surplus population became the excuse for colonialism and the horrors of World War I were justified by the "struggle to survive." The extermination of people during the Nazi era was "applied biology" in the words of Rudolph Hess. It was a program of race purification that began with sterilization and progressed to extensive killing. Developed nations are reluctant to use surplus capital to address fully the roots of hunger in developing countries that are a cheap source of food, labor, or other materials for them. Contraception and abortion in our day are not immoral acts to escape the consequences of irresponsible sex but selfless acts protecting humanity from starvation. Any system that gives aid and comfort to exploiters, colonialists, warmongers, racial supremacists, contraceptors and abortionists "cannot be all bad" as W. C. Fields might have said.

It would be more scientific and humane to welcome persons born to the poor or in developing countries as brothers and sisters, teach them modern production methods, and have them contribute their talents to the world’s wealth rather than dilute it. But that would remove temporary advantages from current elites. Malthusianism is a lie but for them a very useful lie. For that reason it will endure against all evidence because evildoers "love evil rather than good, lies rather than honest speech" (Psalm 52:5).