So the study compares the present with 1971-75? What I like about that is, back in the early 1970s, the popular panic was over the supposedly inevitable mass starvation. To quote from the prologue of Paul Ehrlich’s alarm-ringing screed of 1968, The Population Bomb, which created a firestorm among the earnest, anti-freedom “cultural elites,”
The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. … As the most influential nation in the world today, and its largest consumer, the United States cannot stand isolated. We are today involved in the events leading to famine and ecocatastrophe; tomorrow we may be destroyed by them.
Somehow, despite thousands of scientists and government officials and media yammerers saying mass starvation was imminent, 30 years later we’re worried about an “obesity epidemic.”
