John Derbyshire
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Demography ought to be one of the more exact human sciences. If I know the number of 25-year-olds in a certain population today, I can predict with good accuracy the number of 35-year-olds in that population 10 years from now. Some slight adjustments will need to be made for immigration, emigration, and early mortality, but the relevant statistics are easy to find.
It is therefore curious that one of the most sensational prediction failures in the sciences occurred in demography. That was, of course, Paul Ehrlich’s telling us in his 1968 book The Population Bomb that a Malthusian catastrophe was at hand and that, as a consequence of overpopulation and climate change, “In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.”
Ehrlich’s demographic pessimism had literary company. John Brunner’s novel Stand on Zanzibar (the title alludes to the idea that the Earth’s entire population could fit on the East African island of Zanzibar, but not for much longer) was published the same year. Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! had appeared in 1966; it inspired the 1973 movie Soylent Green.
This was all old hat to me. A sci-fi addict since childhood, I had made my first acquaintance with the demographic subgenre via Cyril Kornbluth’s 1951 short story “The Marching Morons.”
Kornbluth gives us a mid-20th-century American real-estate agent thrown into suspended animation by a botched dental procedure in 1988. When accidentally awoken some centuries later, Earth’s population has doubled and has separated by intelligence. There are 5 billion dumb, useless people with an average IQ of 45—the morons of the story’s title—and only a reserve caste of 3 million high-IQ supervisors who labor thanklessly to prevent the chaos brought by the 5 billion. Here is a bit of dialogue from the book:
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