Doctor Ehrlich & His Magic Bullets

In the business world, when one employee makes consistently accurate judgment calls and one does not, the former is considered a visionary and the latter a mistake no one wants to take the blame for. In academia, on-the-money calculations lead a professor’s peers to view him as, at best, a pest, and at worst, a pariah. The infallibly off-base pedagogue, meanwhile, can write his own ticket as prophet-in-residence.

Case study: Stanford. Case subjects: Thomas Sowell and Paul Ehrlich. Let’s go from the sublime to the ridiculous. Although he is a fellow at the Hoover Institution housed at the university rather than on the faculty at Stanford itself, economist Thomas Sowell should be a big man on any campus. Awarded the National Humanities medal in 2002, Sowell received the Bradley prize for intellectual achievement the following year.

His analysis of failed government programs during the course of his career has proven consistently accurate. In particular, his groundbreaking dissection of the mostly-illusory benefits of affirmative action preceded the tacit admission of the policy’s proponents that quotas had failed to bring about racial advancement.

“Some ideas seem so plausible that they can fail nine times in a row and still be believed the tenth time,” Sowell wrote recently. “Other ideas seem so implausible that they can succeed nine times in a row and still not be believed the tenth time.”

“Government controls in the economy are among the first kinds of ideas and the operation of a free market is among the second kinds of ideas.” Contrast the treatment of Sowell at Stanford with the attention given doomsday theorist Paul Ehrlich, a prized member of Stanford’s faculty. On the university’s web site search engine, Sowell’s name nets 334 entries, Ehrlich’s name gets 1370.

In his book, Intellectual Morons, Accuracy in Academia’s former executive director Dan Flynn assembled some of Ehrlich’s other time-defeated warnings:

• “With a few degrees of cooling a new ice age might be upon us, with rapid and drastic effects on the agricultural productivity of the temperate regions.

• “Meat will get more and more expensive and most of us will become vegetarians.

• “Before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity.”

“Sometimes people say to me, ‘Boy, you said this in The Population Bomb and I don’t think that’s right,” Ehrlich noted last year. “It’s probably something I don’t think is right either.” Unfortunately for Ehrlich, his long- and short-range forecasts are about equally on target.

After writing The Population Bomb, Ehrlich went on to make a bet with free market economist Julian Simon that Stanford’s butterfly expert would lose in the 90s. Ehrlich predicted that the world would run out of five key mineral resources.

And what is next for the biologist who moonlights as a prognosticator? His latest project is called the Millenium Assessment of Human Behavior.

“It would control populations growth, constrain corporate power, and indulge in discussions of global governance,” Atmospheric physicist S. Fred Singer notes. “Oh well, if these exercises soak up lots of foundation money, there will be less left over for real mischief-making activities.”

“But no tax money, please!” Amen, brother.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.