Be careful what you pass laws for. From Jon Miltimore at aier.org:
Kenneth Emde of Minnesota, who came of age during the Swinging Sixties, recently explained why he is childless today.
“I was a college student when I read [Paul] Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb,” he said in a letter published by the Wall Street Journal. “I took it to heart and now have no grandchildren, but 50 years later the population has increased to eight billion without dire consequences. I was gullible and stupid.”
Emde might have been gullible, but that doesn’t make him stupid. Countless people were swept up by the maelstrom of fear created by Ehrlich’s 1968 book, which predicted mass famine due to a coming “population explosion.”
The Population Bomb was omnipresent on college campuses in the late 1960s and early ’70s and received a massive amount of media attention because of its scary subject matter. (Three decades after it was published, I was assigned the book as an undergrad in college.) Ehrlich, who at the time was young, telegenic, and breezily confident, was happy to talk about his book on TV and offer social “remedies.”
His solution to the population bomb began with government-sponsored propaganda designed to convince Americans that no patriotic family would have more than two children (“preferably one”).
