Peter. Michael. Are you familiar with a book called The Population Bomb? I have heard of this book. I have not heard anything else.

I'm aware that there was a book from the mid-centuryish that predicted overpopulation across the globe. Yes, the Population Bomb came out in 1968. It's written by Paul Erlich, who's a professor at Stanford, and it eventually sells the book.

There's two million copies. My initial gut instinct. There's an academic talking about overpopulation. We are at most 10 minutes away from talking about eugenics and 20 minutes away from talking about genocide. I don't know if any other way this can go.

It might take us slightly longer to get there, but that is absolutely where we're going. Oh, God. Okay. So we need to give a bit of background, because as opposed to a lot of the other books that we've covered on this show,

this isn't proposing a new idea. This isn't like, oh, 10,000 hours to play chess or whatever. This is basically crystallizing an idea that had been bouncing around the culture for literally centuries. This is like one of the oldest ideas.

As far as I can tell, Thomas Malthus is the first person to sort of officially propose the idea that the earth just has a limit to how much population it can hold.

We're not going to have an earth with 100 billion people on it. Population growth is exponential. Women has three babies. They have three babies. They have three babies. Whereas food production is linear.

It's extremely difficult to double-crop production and then double it again and double it again. Eventually, you're just going to have a mismatch between those two lines. That means there just aren't enough resources for everybody to eat enough.

Well, look, I've heard enough. It's time to do population control on poor people. That's all there is to it.

But this is kind of the thing, right? This idea is extremely tempting to people with the worst imaginable politics.

So this becomes a really important idea in eugenics before World War II. After the Second World War, you can't really say eugenics openly anymore, but you can talk about family planning.

You can talk about, oh, you know, there might just not be enough to go around. And so we need to start asking some tough questions about who's going to get what we already have.

Right. If only poor people could exercise the good judgment that we do, things would be fine. But since they cannot, we need to talk about our options.

Exactly.

Our incredibly violent options.

This is a huge problem and I'm willing for other people to make some sacrifices is basically the way that it gets framed.

Okay. So I'm going to send you a time magazine cover from like peak population fears. This is actually before Paul Erlich's book comes out.

Like this stuff was already a huge societal anxiety that he was basically reanimating.

So you're going to love this.

Oh no. Oh god.

Oh my god.

Sometimes the racism in these old time covers is like a little dog whistle. And this one, it's like an aeroid siren.

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