All right, so the man behind the overpopulation myth has died, but the media keeps repeating

his debunked claims.

Let's talk this week about how the media and experts have been getting health and human

flourishing wrong for more than 50 years.

Welcome to the Reason Roundtable.

I'm your host, Peter Souterman, and today I am joined by my colleagues, Catherine Manguard,

Matt Welch, and Nick Gillespie.

Catherine, I want to start with you because what we're going to talk about this week is Paul Erlich.

Paul Erlich is the author of the 1968 bestseller, The Population Bomb.

The fundamental argument there was about the dangers of overpopulation.

It was going to be an environmental catastrophe.

And I kind of think that there is a case to be made that Paul Erlich is history's wrongest man.

And yes, I have listened to podcasts, including this one.

But like think about his fundamental thesis, right?

As the population was going to grow, the world would be poorer.

That was the main,

that was the core of his idea. More people, a poorer world. People would starve. We'd have

resource shortages, scarcity. And we now have 60 years of evidence, 60 years of non-scarages,

proving that law. And then, of course, there was the famous bet with Julian Simon, which we could talk about, too.

Yeah.

I mean, he just sucked so bad.

And I'm sorry that he's dead because, unlike Paul Ehrlich, I like a planet full of people.

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