Paul Ehrlich was not subtle, as people seldom are when throwing around the word “bomb.”

The Stanford insect biologist spent the ’60s and ’70s scaring the bejeezus out of people, predicting imminent societal collapse due to overpopulation, with hundreds of millions starving to death. In the big picture, he was right that environmental damage would prove challenging to the survival of the human species, but the devil was in the details, and his presumptions about the short-term ramifications of overpopulation were way off the mark.

Justin Fox of Bloomberg Review reflects on Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb, a Malthusian message so chillingly effective that he did a solid hour one evening on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. The opinion writer finds the philippic a mixed blessing. He points out the scientist’s wrong-mindedness about overcrowding while acknowledging that today’s widely held anti-Ehrlich belief that population will level off naturally could also be incorrect.

One note: Embedded below the Bloomberg excerpt is a new NYT documentary about the ominous prognostication that never came to pass. In it, a comment Ehrlich makes reveals the misanthropy that has always seemed to be lurking behind his views. It’s this: “The idea that every woman should have as many babies as she wants is, to me, exactly the same kind of idea as everybody ought to be permitted to throw as much of their garbage into their neighbor’s backyard as they want.” Wow.

From Fox:

In a just-released New York Times mini-documentary on the book and its aftermath, the now-83-year-old Stanford biologist says insufferable things like, “One of the things that people don’t understand is that timing to an ecologist is very, very different from timing to an average person.” Uh, then why did you write a book clearly aimed at average people that confidently predicted that in the 1970s hundreds of millions would die of famine? “I expressed more certainty because I was trying to bring people to get something done.” (In that vein he also co-founded the activist group Zero Population Growth, rechristened in 2002 as Population Connection.)

Still, I figured I’d give the book itself a chance. I’ve had a copy for years, and thanks to a recentbook-sorting projectI was able to find it in a matter of seconds this morning. Because it’s not very long, I was able to read it in an hour or two. And I have to say it surprised me.

First of all, half of Ehrlich’s prediction came true. He forecast in the book that global population, about 3.5 billion at the time, would double by 2005. He was only six years off on that — world population hit 7 billion in 2011 — which I figure counts as getting it right.

What Ehrlich famously got wrong was the planet’s carrying capacity. Sure, global population doubled. But thanks to theGreen Revolution, per-acre grain yields went up much faster than that. The inflection point in global agricultural productivity, in fact, came just as Ehrlich was finishing his book.

Here’s the interesting thing, though — Ehrlich was well aware that this was a possibility.•

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“Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come.”