If during his last days American biologist Paul Ehrlich had followed events in Singapore, he would have heard something remarkable. Fertility fell to a record low last year, confounding efforts to shore it up. Politicians described the development as an existential challenge.

Ehrlich, who saw population control as vital to humanity’s viability amid a deteriorating environment, was proven wrong. Not only is humankind doing pretty well, leaders in some of the most successful economies want the opposite of what the Stanford University professor prescribed: more babies. China, South Korea, Japan and many European nations are wrestling with ultra-low birthrates and shrinking labor markets. Combined with the swelling ranks of seniors, these forces promise to reshape workplaces, tax systems, immigration and defense.

This isn't the world that Ehrlich, who died on March 13, envisaged when he published "The Population Bomb" in 1968. The book was a smash hit, and the author's frequent appearances at conferences and on television did much to propagate the idea that many of the world's most pressing difficulties could be addressed by clamping down hard on headcount. It might even be too late, he wrote, to avoid apocalyptic outcomes: mass famine, plagues, world wars resulting from food shortages, and pollution so severe that it would be a battle to survive.

“We can no longer afford merely to treat the symptoms of the cancer of population growth; the cancer itself must be cut out," Ehrlich wrote. Calamity would push the United Nations to imposes a “survival tax” that transfers resources to poor countries. Implausibly, an international agency would decide who gets to have children and where.

Viewed from today, the teachings are extreme. The big problem now, according to many policymakers in Asia and beyond, is that there may not be enough of us. The globe’s population did, indeed, grow quickly. But it’s now projected to begin declining after the mid 2080s, according to the UN, sooner than anticipated.

Initiatives unthinkable in the world Ehrlich predicted are catching on. Seoul is paying people who underwent vasectomies to get them reversed, Singapore is dangling incentives at couples to get busy, and the Tokyo municipal government has launched a dating app. They won't move the needle in any major way, though they underscore the message that over-population isn’t something to be feared.

It's important to recognize that Ehrlich was part provocateur, part popularizer. He wasn't the first to question the ability to provide for more humans on the planet. British economist Thomas Malthus, born in the mid-eighteenth century, argued that land could support only so many mouths. In the 1960s and 1970s, the need to husband resources led to the birth of the modern environmental movement. Even Richard Nixon saw the appeal and founded the Environmental Protection Agency. The first Earth Day was celebrated in 1970.

Art also tapped the sense of pending disaster. The 1973 movie "Soylent Green" starred Charlton Heston as a detective in an over-crowded New York of the future. Food, according to the plot, is by then nominally plankton based. He discovers it really came from human corpses.

What Ehrlich missed was that fertility rates were already falling notably and that leaders in Asia had been emphasizing family planning before it was fashionable. For them, it was a route out of poverty — and a means for their countries to survive after the ravages of World War II. The global fertility rate was around 5 the year the year before "The Population Bomb" was published. By the end of the following decade, it was down below 3. At the turn of the century, it was 2.7. The UN reckons the global figure is 2.2 — and falling. In key Asian economies, it’s well below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman.

Not everything Ehrlich prophesized was off the mark. Hunger hasn’t been banished, even if multitudes haven’t perished on the scale he envisaged. And his description of borders being closed owing to pandemics sounds eerily like Covid. Ehrlich was a publicist for a cause that reflected the times. The gasoline shortages and global downturn that followed the 1973 Arab-Israeli War underscored the sense that natural resources aren’t infinite.

Leaders and citizens are facing profound questions on population. “At the macro level, a declining population means less vitality in our city and our economy,” Gan Kim Yong, Singapore’s deputy prime minister said in a Feb. 26 speech. It also “raises the deeper question of what Singapore will be 50 or 100 years from now — will we remain vibrant, livable and relevant?” (Headcount is still growing, slowly, thanks to immigration.)

Population, just as Ehrlich imagined, would be shaping economics well into the 21st century. He was gravely wrong about the manner. The world hasn’t — yet — come to a nasty end. It’s ironic that too few individuals might be able to savor that resilience. The trends he championed won't be easily reversed, no matter how much policymakers strive to do so.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Daniel Moss is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Asian economies. Previously, he was executive editor for economics at Bloomberg News.

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