Overview
- Paul R. Ehrlich died at a nursing facility in Palo Alto at age 93 from cancer complications, his daughter Lisa Marie Daniel told The New York Times.
- His 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb forecast widespread famine and social collapse, including claims that tens of millions of Americans would starve and that England might not exist by 2000, predictions that did not occur as global population and life expectancy rose.
- He lost a 1980 wager with economist Julian Simon over resource scarcity and in 1990 paid $576.07 after the inflation‑adjusted prices of five metals fell, a result widely cited as a rebuke to his depletion thesis.
- Reporting ties his advocacy to international population‑control efforts that, in several countries, included coercive sterilizations and other abuses criticized by scholars and rights advocates.
- Contemporary coverage highlights agricultural gains and falling undernourishment as counter‑evidence, and reactions to his death fault obituaries that called his forecasts ‘premature,’ noting he continued to issue apocalyptic warnings as late as 2018.