By Marian L. Tupy

Allow me to make a prediction: Paul Ehrlich’s new memoir, “Life: A Journey through Science and Politics,” will not be a flop.

It should be, but it won’t.

And while I don’t expect the 90-year-old Stanford University biologist to sell millions of copies, as he did with his 1968 bestseller “The Population Bomb,” he will sell tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of copies to boomers nostalgic for Woodstock, “The Stones” and their own vigor and youth.

Thus Ehrlich, the prophet of doom, covered by the media with obsequious deference, will end his career by profiting one last time from capitalist consumption, which he spent his entire life decrying.

We live in a world of paradoxes. Discount the years of pandemic, reduced life expectancy, high inflation and falling standards of living, and you’ll quickly realize that life for most people in advanced countries is still pretty good. By historical standards, we are astonishingly rich, and even in the developing world, the share of the population in absolute poverty has fallen to single digits.

Compared to the past, a fraction of infants and their mothers die in childbirth. We are so well fed that obesity is rising in Africa, the world’s poorest continent. We live longer and more interesting lives than our ancestors did, pursuing our goals unencumbered by distance or lack of opportunities. Race, sex and sexual orientation never mattered less when moving up the social hierarchy. We carry the entirety of human knowledge — including information about long-term trends in human well-being — in our pockets. Yet, we are addicted to “doomporn.” Why?

“Organisms that treat threats as more urgent than opportunities have a better chance to survive and reproduce,” wrote eminent Princeton University psychologist Daniel Kahneman in his 2013 book “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” Put differently, humans have evolved to prioritize bad news. That’s true of our hardware, or the physical structure of the brain, and our software, the evolved programs with which we react to the world around us.

https://www.deseret.com/2023/1/19/23552189/paul-ehrlich-population-bomb-julian-simon-bet