Commentary In the spring of 1990, I was a young professor, sitting in the annual convocation ceremony of a third-rate college in West Virginia. It’s a beautiful place, founded in the 1840s, classical architecture in leafy Appalachia, but it struggled to attract wealthy students, so its pursuit of prestige was never-ending. A typical device was awarding doctoral degrees honoris causa to any celebrity who’d impress the parents. So there I sat in Convocation Hall, watching an honorary doctorate awarded to “population expert” Paul Ehrlich. It was surreal. Biologist Paul Ehrlich became an intelligentsia celebrity in 1968, thanks to his doomsday prophecy, “The Population Bomb,” screaming that the world faced resource depletion, economic collapse, and mass starvation by the late-1970s. This was inevitable, he argued, because people multiply faster than their capacity to feed themselves. Yet here we sat, 10 years past the Inevitable End of the World, and all of …