Here’s one reason people don’t pay attention to big risks: too many times they’ve heard that things will fall apart in a big way, such as overpopulation as predicted back in 1968 (by which prediction we should have probably 10 billion people on the planet now), and some of the more overblown Y2K predictions; many of these are cataloged in an article by Michael Crichton.

Notice that in 1968, when Ehrlich published his book The Population Bomb, world fertility was already in decline. Ehrlich was thus urging people to do what they had already been doing for about 10 years. It’s not clear whether he knew this or not. But certainly when he said, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over….At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate…” he was simply wrong. As you see, after his book appeared the death rate remained flat in developed countries, and it continued to fall for another 10 years in developing countries.
Fear, Complexity, & Environmental Management in the 21st Century Washington Center for Complexity and Public Policy, Washington DC, November 6, 2005, By Michael Crichton

Crichton remarks that Erhlich was merely crying out in desperation to urge what’s already happening. However, Crichton also neglects to mention that a quite significant government initiative, the One-Child Policy in China, was promulgated after Erhlich’s warning and has apparently had a significant effect on population growth in China, which is now expected to peak somewhere around 1.5 billion in about 2025. In other words, China chose to change its demographics to start acting like a developed country before it became one. Crichton also doesn’t mention improvements in food production that weren’t known to be possible when Erhlich wrote. Erlich was in fact wrong in his predictions, but Crichton is also wrong in implying that things would have gone as well if nobody had tried to do anything to change the situation. Continue reading →