Paul Ehrlich, the former Stanford professor and author of the 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb,1 passed away on March 13 of this year. Ehrlich famously predicted widespread famine in the 1970s driven by unchecked population growth—growth he believed was fueled by rising prosperity in developing nations. His warnings extended beyond prediction into prescription, including calls for aggressive government intervention to curb birth rates. news.

Ehrlich was hardly the first prophet of economic and demographic doom, nor will he be the last.2 There remains a persistent and expanding class of what might be called ‘miserabilists’—those convinced that current trends inevitably lead to catastrophe. Among the more prominent modern voices is NYU professor Scott Galloway, who has advanced a kind of inverted “population bomb.” In his telling, the problem is not too many people, but too few—a decline in family formation driven by high housing costs and allegedly stagnating real incomes for younger workers.

At first glance, Ehrlich and Galloway appear to be making opposite arguments. In reality, they share a common premise: that birthrates rise with prosperity. Ehrlich feared that rising incomes would drive unsustainable population growth; Galloway argues that insufficient income growth is suppressing fertility. They are, in effect, traveling along the same conceptual road—just in opposite directions.

The problem is that this shared premise is, empirically, completely wrong.

One of the most robust findings in demographic economics is the long-run negative relationship between income and fertility. As families grow wealthier, birthrates decline.3 This pattern holds across countries, within countries, and over time. When immigrants move from poorer, higher birthrate nations to richer, lower birthrate nations, their fertility behavior quickly converges towards that of the host country.

Of course, significant short run economic disruptions (think depressions) do cause temporary declines in birthrates for obvious reasons. But these exceptions are dominated by the long run trends. While the sources of the causal relationship between greater wealth and lower birthrates may be debated, the modern data are unequivocal. This explains why Ehrlich’s dire predictions never materialized. The world did not descend into mass famine in the 1970s nor in any decade since because developing nations such as India and Indonesia experienced sharp slowdowns in population growth as incomes rose, not the other way around.

Globally, fertility has fallen from about 5 births per woman in 1950 to roughly 2.3 today, and population growth has slowed from about 2.1% annually in the late 1960s to under 1.0% today (the United Nations projects that world population will peak at approximately 10.3 billion in the mid 2080s). Despite the trends, Ehrlich doubled down on his views in 1990 with The Population Explosion, and clung to them, claiming overpopulation was still a critical issue as late as 2011.

And that brings us to Galloway’s focus on falling birthrates and his argument that declining real income among younger generations is preventing family formation and lowering birthrates. This, again, asserts a positive relationship between prosperity and birthrates, just in the reverse direction.

It’s certainly true that fertility has been falling in the United States… it has been since 2007 and is now the lowest on record.4 The problem with Galloway’s theory is that real incomes are not declining, they’re rising sharply. The narrative of income decline has grown so common in the media and among public officials over the last decade, I appreciate that it may be difficult to believe, but that’s the data. Real (inflation adjusted) per capita disposable income in the United States hit a record high in 2025, up 32% from 2007, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, and easily found on the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) online database maintained by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

And yes, this holds true for younger households as well. The following graph shows real median household income for young households based on U.S. Census household income data.5 Household income in the 25-to-34 year-old range is up 23% since 2007, while it’s up 20% in the 35-to-44 year old range. Younger workers may have more student loan debt, but they also have a lot more education. This recently published article in The Economist, “Gen Z is Unprecedentedly Rich,” is a worthy read.

And as for the ‘K-shaped’ recovery (where only some rise while others fall), see my recent commentary for a fuller discussion about the reality of rising prosperity. Younger families may not be having as many babies, but it can’t be from falling incomes.

Even concerns about wealth inequality don’t rescue the argument. In the United States today, while the top 1% of the population hold roughly 30% of the private wealth (too much), estimates suggest that the figure was closer to 40%–45% a century ago when birthrates were significantly higher. If inequality were the dominant driver, the historical pattern should look very different.

Based on the data, both Ehrlich’s and Gallow’s claims are easily disprovable, yet both have done well pitching messages built around decline. The Population Bomb sold over 2 million copies, and Ehrlich was on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show 20 times (according to his Wikipedia page). Similarly, Galloway is a media personality with a consulting company, books, blog posts, and now a for-pay podcast.

Why do people buy into false bad news so easily? The persistence of such belief is not a failure of intelligence, but a feature of human cognition. Decades of research in behavioral economics—most notably by Nobel laureates Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler—have shown how individuals are prone to cognitive biases and how such biases promote negative narratives more than positive ones.

The net result is that every generation, no matter how prosperous compared to the previous one, always seems to invent the narrative that things used to be better. See Dan Ariely’s book, Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things for a wonderful exposition on these issues.

But why would professors at NYU and Stanford, smart people at ease with data, believe such false stories? A cynical view would be that some academics pitch false narratives for self-aggrandizement and monetary gain, con men with PhDs.

That view, however, may be oversimplifying a more complex reality. There is substantial evidence that highly intelligent individuals are often better at defending incorrect beliefs—more skilled at selectively interpreting data, constructing persuasive narratives, and identifying weaknesses in opposing arguments. In other words, high intelligence can amplify, rather than mitigate, confirmation bias, a process known as motivated reasoning.

Regardless of motive, the torch of miserabilism has not been extinguished with Ehrlich’s passing. It’s been passed on. Why does that matter? In this amplified information age, the miserabilist creed has become a major driver of political populism, with false beliefs affecting real policy.

The key to reversing this damaging trend is a highly personal one. We need to recognize that every one of us has the capacity to believe things that aren’t true and we have to be willing to really examine and consider other ideas. As physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman famously quipped, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.”

(1) Ehrlich, Paul. The Population Bomb. 1968.

(2) There is nothing new in the “we’re all going to starve” narrative. Such arguments even have a name—Malthusianism, named after Thomas Malthus, who penned one of the earliest known academic treatises on said topic in 1798. Malthus at least had history on his side, as his observations on population growing to the limits of the available food supply reflected almost all of human history up until that point. Ehrlich and Galloway do not have such an excuse.

(3) Becker, Gary S. ‘An Economic Analysis of Fertility.’ 1960; and subsequent literature.

(4) There was an uptick in fertility between the late 1980’s and 2007, driven by a surge in international migration from developing nations. The foreign born share of the U.S. population grew from 4.7% in 1970 to 11.1% in 2000.

(5) The data presented here is deflated with the Bureau of Economic Analysis’ PCE deflator, not with the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ CPI deflator.