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Paul Ehrlich was wrong about everything
Mar 20, 2026
Biologist and author Paul Ehrlich, the most influential Chicken Little of the last century, died at the age of 93 this week. His 1968 book, “The Population Bomb,” launched decades of institutional panic in government, entertainment and journalism.
Ehrlich’s core neo-Malthusian argument was that overpopulation would exhaust the supply of food and natural resources, leading to a cascade of catastrophes around the world. “The Population Bomb” opens with a bold prediction, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”
“If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000,” Ehrlich prophesized during a speech in 1971. He also said that the U.S. would be rationing water by 1974, and food by 1980. That smog in L.A. and New York would cause some 200,000 deaths per year. That Americans born after World War II wouldn’t live past 50.
It’s difficult to exaggerate the grip Ehrlich and his followers had on elite opinion and the popular imagination. A founder of Zero Population Growth (now Population Connection), Ehrlich inspired the modern population control movement.
As Charles Mann chronicled in Smithsonian magazine, Ehrlich inspired global efforts to push abortion, birth control and even sterilization by governments, the United Nations and other international organizations, and foundations. “The results were horrific,” Betsy Hartmann, author of “Reproductive Rights and Wrongs,” told Mann.
“Some population-control programs pressured women to use only certain officially mandated contraceptives,” Mann writes. “In Egypt, Tunisia, Pakistan, South Korea and Taiwan, health workers’ salaries were, in a system that invited abuse, dictated by the number of IUDs they inserted into women. In the Philippines, birth-control pills were literally pitched out of helicopters hovering over remote villages. Millions of people were sterilized, often coercively, sometimes illegally, frequently in unsafe conditions, in Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Indonesia and Bangladesh.”
In the U.S. the Ehrlicheans talked about requiring licenses for babies and putting birth control in the (dwindling) water supply.
Earlier, I said it’s difficult to exaggerate the grip Ehrlich’s thesis “had” on elite opinion. The truth, however, is that the grip endures. The sub-headline of the New York Times’ obituary reads, “His best-selling 1968 book, which forecast global famines, made him a leader of the environmental movement. But he faced criticism when his predictions proved premature.”
Premature?
England still exists. Life expectancy in the U.S. just set a record high of 79 (in Europe it’s 81.5 ). There is no country in the world with a life expectancy under 50. Air and water quality are much better today than they were in 1968. Global food production has exploded. Famine is rare, and almost always a product of war or the backward command-and-control economic thinking Ehrlich supported. And fertility rates are worrisomely declining throughout the developed world, and far beyond. Slightly more than half the world’s nations have sub-replacement birthrates. We have not run out of any resources and America has more forests than it did a century ago.
So, which predictions were “premature,” exactly?
There’s something about Malthusian dread that is simply too seductive to shake. For instance, a few years ago, I noticed something weird. On the 50th anniversary of “Soylent Green,” a dystopian, Ehrlichean film about overpopulation and food shortages, a number of writers opined how “prescient” the movie was. No less than the normally reasonable magazine the Economist wrote, “It is impossible to watch the film today without weighing up how accurate its predictions turned out to be.” It’s an “eerie prophecy,” they declared.
Really? It’s “impossible to watch” a movie about mass state-sponsored euthanasia that turns human beings into high-protein crackers to fend off starvation — set in 2022! — without marveling at the accuracy of its predictions?
Perhaps the most remarkable thing is not that Ehrlich turned out to be so wildly wrong, but that he was so obviously wrong from the beginning. My old boss Ben Wattenberg battled Ehrlich throughout the 1970s and 1980s. His feud began with a 1970 article for the New Republic titled, “The Nonsense Explosion,” in which Wattenberg explained that even as Ehrlich was writing about soaring birthrates, birthrates were already declining.
Ehrlich’s defenders — and they are legion — argue that he was a true prophet in that prophets issue apocalyptic warnings that, if heeded, can be avoided. This is more nonsense. He said mass “die-offs” were unavoidable with even the best policies, and the anti-growth fads he supported largely made things worse.
Simply put, his pessimism was too big to fail.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.
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People clear rubble in a house in the Beryanak District after it was damaged by missile attacks two days before, on March 15, 2026 in Tehran, Iran. The United States and Israel continued their joint attack on Iran that began on February 28. Iran retaliated by firing waves of missiles and drones at Israel, and targeting U.S. allies in the region.
Getty Images, Majid Saeedi
Bravado Isn’t a Strategy: Why the Iran War Has No Endgame
Mar 19, 2026
Most of what we have heard from the administration as it pertains to the Iran War is swagger and bro-talk. A few days into the war, the White House released a social media video that combined footage of the bombardment with clips from video games. Not long after, it released a second video, titled “Justice the American Way,” that mixed images of the U.S. military with scenes from movies like Gladiator and Top Gun Maverick.
Speaking to reporters at the Pentagon, War Secretary Pete Hegseth boasted of “death and destruction from the sky all day long.” “They are toast, and they know it,” he said. “This was never meant to be a fair fight... we are punching them while they’re down.”
Not to be outdone, President Trump said the Iranian regime had been “decimated” and demanded unconditional surrender. This came not long after he praised the United States and Israel for continuing to “totally demolish the enemy far ahead of schedule and at levels that people have never seen before.”
Even in the face of soaring gas prices and plummeting poll numbers, Trump is leading with a brotesque bravado. "We're achieving major strides toward completing our military objective. And some people could say they're pretty well complete," he said during his first press conference after the War began. "We've wiped every single force in Iran out, very completely; most of Iran's naval power has been sunk."
Likewise, in a call with NBC’s Kristen Welker, he said that although the U.S. had “totally demolished” Iran’s military capabilities, he could “hit it” a “few more times, just for fun.”
He is not wrong when it comes to the advantage the U.S. has on the battlefield. By almost every measure, with a yearly budget around $1T, more than 700 overseas bases, unmatched prowess in terms of technology, airpower, and naval strength, the American military is the most powerful fighting force the world has ever known.
Despite this, under Trump’s leadership, the U.S. has been unable to weaken the Iranian regime, which today is more entrenched and hardline than ever. We are in this position because the president does not understand several key lessons of war, including the most basic: brute force is not enough. Carl von Clausewitz famously made this case in his early 19th C. classic, On War. Military action only succeeds when military aims and political objectives are aligned, when force serves a political purpose, and when the enemy’s will can be broken in a way that produces an outcome that can hold. Administrations that have carried out successful military campaigns throughout American history have understood this.
This is not the case in Operation Epic Fury. Instead, it is a war started by people who have not been able to tell a story as to how we can win. In law, we often apply a reasonable person standard to determine liability. The same is true when it comes to war; prior to any action, those who support it must be able to tell a story of how it can be won, and that narrative must be one a reasonable, ordinary person deems plausible.
When this is not done, the result is what we see today, a war that is wildly unpopular. A recent average of surveys shows the war is supported by just 38% of Americans. Another compilation of polls shows that the president is 5% underwater when it comes to support for the war, a number that threatens to only get worse as the number of service men and women killed and wounded rises, along with the price of gas and other goods.
As a result, Trump has only a few options at his disposal, and none of them are good.
The best of the bad options is de-escalation. If he takes it, it would not be the first time. Last March, he went to war against the Houthis, loudly berating Joe Biden for failing to do so. After months of bombing, however, he recognized what his predecessors already knew – the attacks were to no avail, and he backed down.
De-escalation in the case of Iran could take one of two forms. It is less likely that Trump will back down and return to the negotiation table to secure a deal he can boast is bigger and better than the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal President Obama struck. We heard Trump tease this possibility recently on Fox News, saying he was willing to talk with Tehran. Unsurprisingly, Iran rejected his advance. Given how brutal the campaign has been, the fact that they did go back to the table after the U.S. strikes last year, only to be hit again, not to mention the fact that the entire family of the newly installed leader was killed in the operation, Tehran’s reaction is not unexpected. Nor would it be to Trump, had he internalized another basic Clausewitzian lesson, “the enemy has a vote.”
A more likely de-escalation scenario is what we began to hear from Trump early this week, hints that the war was close to ending, and this was nothing more than an “excursion,” mixed with bellicose declarations of victory. The war, he told a CBS reporter, “is very complete, pretty much,” noting that Iran’s military had been largely destroyed. “If you look, they have nothing left. There's nothing left in a military sense.” He echoed this later, declaring victory but then hedging. “We’ve already won,” he said, “but we haven’t won enough... we go forward more determined than ever to achieve ultimate victory that will end this long-running danger once and for all.”
Prior to moving in this direction, however, Trump will have to ensure the Strait of Hormuz is reopened to shipping. This is why he has exerted so much energy in the last several days trying to get our NATO allies and countries around the world to lend support to that effort. Despite his attempts to strong-arm, chastise, and threaten our allies into entering the conflict, so far, no one has come forward. In fact, to the contrary, all have adopted a position best summed up by Germany’s Prime Minister Friedrich Merz, “This war has nothing to do with NATO. It is not NATO’s war. Participation has not been considered before the war and is not being considered now.” This is another reminder of a life/war lesson Trump should have learned long ago: build the lifeboat before the ship begins sinking – or, in this case, forge and nurture alliances in advance of crises.
If Trump goes down either de-escalation path A or B, even his hyperbolic claims and public pronouncements of victory cannot mask the reality, by the administration’s own fluid measure, little will have been achieved. Despite the shifting public pronouncements, three goals have always made up the core of the administration’s objectives: dismantling Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs, and ending its support of proxies such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. None of this is possible, however, without regime change; and it is not just any change that is needed, but the installment of a regime that is uninterested in reconstituting its weapons programs or reestablishing ties with its proxies, in addition to being friendly to the U.S. and Israel.
What has happened, however, is exactly the opposite. Far from capitulating, days after the US and Israel decapitated the regime, killing the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khmeni, the Assembly of Experts chose his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, to succeed his father as the third leader of the Islamic Republic. U.S. intelligence reports over the last few days suggest that after more than two weeks of strikes, the Iranian regime has not only “consolidated power” but is more entrenched and “hardline” than ever before; in addition, they speculate it will likely remain in place for some time.
The second option is to incite an uprising. So far, however, there are few signs of one. Indeed, the United States has arguably made that outcome less likely by hollowing out instruments of soft power such as the Voice of America (VOA) and by carrying out bombings that have killed many innocent civilians. The same Iranians that the president said he hoped would rise up have not only been subject to constant bombing but have also been relegated to sheltering inside and watching funerals of innocent school children killed as a result of the joint US/Israeli attacks. Under those conditions, even Iranians who loathe the regime have little reason to align themselves with Washington or Jerusalem.
Moreover, history tells us that despite the president's call for a popular uprising, revolution in Iran is most likely to come from those who have access to guns and ammunition – namely, the Kurds and the Azerbaijanis. Yet, even the president has said this is unlikely.
The final option also involves escalation, putting American boots on the ground in a limited or more extended capacity. While the latter is almost unthinkable given Trump’s campaign pronouncements that he would end forever wars, neither has been taken off the table. The more likely of the two would involve limited incursions by Special Operations Forces. And if the US and Israel have any hope left of achieving even a portion of their stated goal of dismantling Iran’s nuclear capacity, they will have to send troops and other experts in to safely remove the more than 900 pounds of enriched nuclear material currently buried under the mountain that Trump bombed last year.
Whatever option Trump goes with, the U.S. is in this position because he began a war in the Middle East despite the fact that he was unable to pass the most basic test required of all successful war leaders: prior to engaging militarily, make sure you can tell a plausible story of how your limited goals can successfully be achieved. Moreover, make sure the narrative is one that passes muster with most reasonable people.
Jeanne Sheehan Zaino is a professor of political science at Iona University, a democracy visiting fellow at the Harvard Kennedy Schools' Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, senior democracy fellow at the Center for the Study of the Presidency & Congress, & a Bloomberg News political contributor.Keep ReadingShow less
A Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) cadet walks through campus November 7, 2003 in Princeton, New Jersey.
Getty Images, Spencer Platt
Hegseth is Dumbing Down the Military (on Purpose)
Mar 19, 2026
One day before the United States began an ill-defined and illegal war of indefinite length with Iran, Pete Hegseth angrily attacked a different enemy: the Ivy League. The Secretary of War denounced Ivy League universities as "woke breeding grounds of toxic indoctrination” and then eliminated long-standing college fellowship programs with more than a dozen elite colleges, which had historically served as a pipeline for service members to the upper ranks of military leadership. Of the schools now on Hegseth’s "no-fly list," four sit in the top ten of the World’s Top Universities for 2026. So, why does the Secretary of War not want his armed forces to have the best education available? Because he wants a military without a brain.
For a guy obsessed with being the strongest and most lethal force in the world, cutting access to world-class schools is a bizarre gambit. It does reveal Hegseth doesn’t consider intelligence a factor–let alone an asset–in strength or lethality. That tracks. Hegseth alleges the Ivies infect officers with “globalist and radical ideologies that do not improve our fighting ranks…” God forbid the tip of the sword of our foreign policy has knowledge of international cooperation and global interconnectedness. The Ivy League has its own issues, but the Pentagon’s claim that they "fail to deliver rigorous education grounded in realism” is almost laughable. I’m a veteran Lieutenant Commander with two Ivy League degrees, both paid for with military tuition assistance, and I promise: it was rigorous. Meanwhile, are Hegseth’s performative politics grounded in reality? Attacking Harvard on social media the eve of initiating a new war with a foreign adversary is disgraceful, and even delusional.
As a matter of national security, we need our service members to be well educated, and the service academies are sadly insufficient. The Air Force Operating Concept 2035 advises that future advantages belong to "bold, adaptive, and innovative leaders," yet service academies often produce officers whose “supervised and structured” experiences have consisted mainly of "responding to directions." Even the U.S. Army War College articulated the issue here: “it is assumed that the…structured, centralized system will…develop them into out-of-the-box thinkers... The probability of that happening is slim.” Outside fellowships were designed in part to correct this, injecting broader perspectives into an often conforming system. By canceling them, Hegseth all-but-ensures the upper ranks remain academy-reared echo chambers.
As Hegseth strips our officers’ access to the best research institutions in the world, China is doing the opposite. Recognizing that it is more important to outthink your enemy than to outfight him, the 2026 Chinese Five-Year Plan emphasizes investing in research and cultivating world-class talent. But while “Chinese leaders are encouraging the creation of a more innovative and creative youth…the U.S. is going towards an elitist and backward education system where conformist citizens are validated and rewarded.” It’s even worse in the U.S. military–a regimented organization historically and continuously valuing obedience and uniformity, even submissiveness, where too often successful innovation only occurs after the existing leadership and doctrine have been delegitimized by defeat. Waiting for defeat to knock enough sense into us that we finally challenge the status quo won’t keep our country safe.
The military needs these institutions. Hegseth cannot compete with the civilian research ecosystem–the Ivy League’s cutting-edge AI laboratories, semiconductor programs, or professors. While I was in ROTC at the University of Pennsylvania, Professor David Eisenhower, the grandson of President Eisenhower, became a mentor of mine. As an officer-in-training, I cherished learning from the grandson of the former Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe during World War II, because duh. By severing the military’s ties to the world’s finest institutions, Hegseth will isolate the force and weaken it.
The isolation is intentional; it is easier to indoctrinate in a bubble. Hegseth isn’t mad that servicemembers go to good schools but that they practice the kind of thinking while there that may lead them to one day challenge the Trump agenda. For the same reason, the Trump regime attacked veteran lawmakers who dared to remind service members of their legal duty to disobey unlawful orders. Hegseth now wants to avoid the influence of education. Because, as the regime flirts increasingly with lawlessness, they want troops who won’t question orders. Hegseth craves compliance, and thinking threatens that. Eliminating “wokeness” is a happy byproduct, but the goal is blind obedience. It’s a strategic lobotomy.
Given that the Secretary of War is taking the best educational opportunities away from our servicemembers, we must examine what he is giving them instead. As it turns out, Hegseth is swapping elite fellowships for extremist rhetoric from figures like Pastor Doug Wilson, cultivating a force primed for radicalization. The consequences are already surfacing: Military Religious Freedom Foundation reports indicate dozens of commanders are gleefully framing the Iran conflict as "God’s divine plan," casting the President as a messianic figure "anointed" to ignite Armageddon. This blurring of church and state is a direct assault on any oath to support and defend the Constitution.
If we continue along this path, the Trump regime will eventually reduce the ranks to an isolated horde of white Christian nationalist loyalists, rendering the American military a brute squad. Somewhere along the way, however, we may discover that a military that lacks the intellectual framework to uphold its oath to the Constitution is also not one that can outsmart an enemy. War would be a harrowing place to learn that lesson.
The transformation is not yet complete. Congress should exercise its oversight authority to protect these educational pipelines, and the targeted institutions should proactively create military-civilian education initiatives that can survive any single administration’s mandate. Harvard is allowing servicemembers to defer admission while also arranging for “expedited consideration” at non-blacklisted schools–others should follow suit. And for those currently in uniform: continue to read and be curious, to think critically, and to mentor each other to be "bold, adaptive, and innovative leaders.” The intellectual integrity of the force may be yours to preserve.Julie Roland was a Naval Officer for ten years, deploying to both the South China Sea and the Persian Gulf as a helicopter pilot before separating in June 2025 as a Lieutenant Commander. She has a law degree from the University of San Diego, a Master of Laws from Columbia University, and is a member of the Truman National Security Project.
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Person working at a desk with a laptop and books.
Photo by Microsoft Copilot on Unsplash
Are We Prepared for a World Where AI Isn’t at Work?
Mar 19, 2026
Draft an important email without using AI. Write it from scratch — no suggestions, no autocomplete, and no prompt to ChatGPT to compose or revise the email.
Now ask yourself: Did it feel slower? Harder? Slightly uncomfortable?
For many of us, AI tools have quietly become part of how we think at work. And that raises a question we are not asking often enough: What happens if those tools aren’t there?
Nearly half of employees report using AI tools at work, despit explicit bans by their employers, according to a recent survey by security company Anagram: a striking reminder that organizational policies and technological practice are already out of sync. When policies lag behind practice, or tools spread informally, it raises a deeper question about AI’s role in work — now and in the future.
For the past two years, the future of work has been told as a single story: AI is here, it is transformative, and workplaces must adapt or fall behind. Companies are reorienting and reorganizing teams around it. Job descriptions now quietly assume fluency with generative tools. Productivity expectations are rising accordingly.
Yet even as AI becomes embedded in everyday work, permanent access to these tools is far from guaranteed. That uncertainty is already surfacing at the policy level. In a recent move, the Trump administration ordered government agencies to stop using AI systems from the company Anthropic amid disputes over how such technologies should be used in federal operations. The episode highlights how access to AI tools can quickly become entangled in legal, political, and institutional battles. To comply with federal directives, other organizations may soon follow suit.
But here’s a question almost no one is asking: What if AI isn’t always there?
What if AI becomes too expensive? Too legally risky? Too privacy-invasive? What if regulations tighten? What if a major data breach or liability case forces organizations to scale back? What if public institutions, schools, healthcare systems or government agencies prohibit it?
We are spending enormous energy preparing for an AI-augmented future. We are spending almost none preparing for the possibility that AI might not be reliably embedded in our workplaces.
History suggests that technological change rarely follows a straight, upward line.
Remote work after COVID is an example. At one point, fully remote work seemed like the inevitable future. Yet as organizations experimented, many converged on hybrid models that balanced flexibility with coordination and culture.
AI may follow a similar path. Today’s dominant narrative assumes continuous integration and growth with AI. But rising costs, sustainability concerns, legal uncertainty and public debate could slow or redirect this trajectory. Organizations may overcorrect after incidents, restrict use, and access may become uneven.
Recent lawsuits underscore that risk. Amazon has faced legal action over allegations that workplace monitoring tools intruded on worker privacy — highlighting how digital oversight technologies can quickly become flashpoints for legal and ethical scrutiny. If AI-driven systems blur the line between productivity support and surveillance, regulatory and reputational consequences could reshape how widely they are deployed.
There is another issue lurking beneath the surface: de-skilling.
AI tools are increasingly capable of drafting emails, summarizing documents, generating code, synthesizing research, and even recommending decisions. They feel like frictionless assistants. And they are genuinely useful.
But decades ago, researchers studying automation warned of the “ironies of automation.” When systems fail, humans are suddenly expected to intervene — without having maintained the underlying expertise.
Our recent research identified this AI-as-Amplifier Paradox: AI’s dual role as an enhancer and an eroder, simultaneously strengthening performance while eroding underlying expertise. We found how we may be entering an era of gradual, almost invisible deskilling. In other words, AI may boost performance in the moment, but may quietly weaken the skills underneath. We are getting better at using AI at work, while losing the muscle memory of critical thinking and independent reasoning. This is an asymptomatic AI harm. It does not announce itself. We will likely only realize it when the AI is not available.
If AI disappeared tomorrow, how many organizations could still perform at the same level of rigor and judgment?
To be sure, AI offers real and measurable benefits. The question is whether we are building ecosystems that depend on it — or ecosystems that remain resilient without it.
Public debate often frames the future in extremes: either we embrace AI everywhere, or we resist it. But that binary misses a more plausible middle path.
Instead of asking whether work should be AI-augmented or AI-free, we should be asking whether it is AI-resilient.
An AI-resilient workplace thrives with AI but does not collapse without it. AI enhances work, but does not become a single point of failure. Human expertise is cultivated continuously, not quietly outsourced. Organizations can scale back AI without destabilizing workflows.
This is not anti-technology. It is an institutional and societal responsibility.
There is also an equity dimension. Access to AI is not evenly distributed. Professional licenses are expensive, and costs are already trending upward, while free tiers are becoming more limited — or disappearing altogether. Privacy-sensitive industries restrict usage. Public institutions face compliance barriers. Some organizations ban AI outright. If productivity standards quietly assume AI assistance, but access is uneven, we risk creating a new fault line: workers who are AI-augmented and workers who are not.
AI tools could become a form of workplace privilege rather than shared infrastructure.
If we design our workplaces under the assumption that AI will always be cheap, accessible, and legally uncomplicated, we risk building brittle systems — systems that require constant AI support to function.
We need to rethink building workplaces that can thrive with AI — and continue functioning without it.
Dr. Koustuv Saha is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s (UIUC) Siebel School of Computing and Data Science and is a Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project. He studies how online technologies and AI shape and reveal human behaviors and wellbeing.
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