The world’s population is reaching 8 billion for the first time in history this month. This is the population bomb that Paul and Ann Ehrlich described in their 1968 book. They warned that the fight to control population growth was over and that hundreds of millions of people would die of famine.

The growth of the population slowed perceptively over the next half century, and some now proclaim the population bomb never detonated. In fact, another 4 billion people were added to the world’s population in the 54 years after Ehrlich’s book. Tragically hundreds of millions of people did in fact starve to death, even as food production has markedly increased, but malnutrition remains one of the leading causes of infant mortality.

Why did this tragedy occur even though it’s still often dismissed as something that never happened?

The conventional narrative was that as people’s incomes rose, they would have fewer children, so the US could use “development aid” to turn the tide. This demographic transition theory was so embedded in academic and government views of population that the idea of actually doing anything directly about birth rates was considered completely unnecessary. Everything would happen automatically. And we could continue to pretend that “development “worked.

In the United States, even as it got more prosperous, a huge post-World War baby boom pushed births to over 4.5 million annually.  Even as birth rates then peaked in 1964 and started to decline, the US population continued to grow by over 3 million annually as the baby boom generation grew up and had its own children.

On top of this, we decided without much thought to dramatically increase immigration levels at exactly the same time the baby boom population birth rate explosion peaked and was starting to decline. So, while birth rates have markedly slowed, we are still adding a city the size of New York every decade and a population of 226 million in 1980 now exceeds 330 million.

Even as the US assumed its own population explosion was under control, it decided it would bring the worldwide population under control as well. It was thought if the US along with development assistance simply distributed tons of contraceptives to the third world under an international family planning program, birth rates in Pakistan and Mexico and Nigeria would plummet as unwanted childbearing would be avoided, and the population bomb would not explode.

Since 1965 the US has spent billions through the US State Department, the World Bank and the United Nations distributing pills, condoms and IUDs throughout the third world, under a voodoo demographic theory of “contraceptive inundation.”

One trick the family planners used was to assume for every 1000 boxes of contraceptives distributed in say Egypt, the birth rates would automatically decline by “x” number of points, irrespective of what the in-country census numbers indicated.

In 1979, first lady Sadat of Egypt took US first lady Rosalyn Carter on a tour of an Egyptian village to highlight the success of “family planning.” The Muslim village bigshot who “distributed” the family planning largesse from International Planned Parenthood, for example, asked his wife to show Mrs. Carter how successful the contraceptive distribution programs were.

She dutifully brought dozens of boxes from under her own bed where the head man for the past year had stored them, still filled with UN purchased condoms and cycles of pills, still wrapped, as “proof.”

Supporters would claim this was all a success as hundreds of millions of women apparently have decided not to have “unwanted children” through the miracle of “family planning.” After all, have not birth rates now declined?

Yes, birth rates did eventually decline but the reason was not what demographers had assumed.

According to Robert Gillespie of Population Communication, what happened to propel birth rates downward over the past decades was the advent of worldwide social media. Parents everywhere saw what opportunities lay around the world and how “others” are making it.

Parents worldwide from Iran, Brazil, Pakistan and Egypt, decided that the chances of their children finding success was inversely related to the number of children they had. A smaller number of children meant the odds of the children, not the parents, finding a decent education and job opportunities went up dramatically. Birth rates declined even in nations such as Brazil that opposed “family planning” programs or in Iran where such programs from the UN and World Bank were negligible.

Third, while global family planning programs rested on absurd ideas, the idea of limiting population was not to stop the growth of either the poor or non-western or non-white people. It was not an outgrowth of Sanger’s eugenics.

According to Hubert Humphrey, the program was to prevent societies of all kinds from being overwhelmed and thus made unstable by the sheer numbers. This was especially true given so many of the less developed “Group of 77” at the United Nations were enthralled with socialism and government controlled and regulated economies that made providing for any population let alone a dramatically expanding population, a grueling and largely unsuccessful endeavor.

The boom in population was actually quite sudden. The dramatic decline in child mortality was not foreseen as suddenly growth rates soared not because people were having more children but because so many of their children were surviving. On top of which, the absence of free enterprise and economic freedom was an automatic sentence of mass poverty for billions, especially in the southern hemisphere and what was described as the less developed world.

Just take South Asia. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh had 600 million people when the US started “family planning in 1965 when Vice President Hubert Humphrey successful campaigned to annually authorize $50 million for the Office of Population. (Now over $500 million). The three countries now have 1.8 billon people and are burdened by staggering poverty held in place by a ridged caste system, violent Islamic culture that downgrades women and education, and largely state-run socialism that prevents economic growth and entrepreneurship.

But the family planning mafia got a strangle hold on US population policy and we wasted nearly half a century inundating the third world with condoms even as in South Asia for example the three countries tripled their numbers.

Ironically, while it is assumed that human invention and ingenuity would develop the technology necessary to sustain life on this planet for a growing population, elites in most western nations are trying hard to force continued poverty onto the very countries where poverty is most endemic—through crazy policies banning fossil fueled based fertilizers or eliminating cattle.

That was not always the case. US assistance and development money helped agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug’s ingenuity in dramatically increasing grain yields to bring a “Green Revolution” and fed billions previously thought destined for only starvation.

But the good news ends there. Half of the people of Africa lack access to both potable water, simple sanitation and access to electricity. But with fracking and natural gas production, Africa with its reserves could lift millions of poor people out of poverty.

But the World Bank and top European countries are actively prohibiting the construction of electrical generating facilities in Africa while working to import billions of cubic meters of natural gas, even as the populations of the African continent remain in energy poverty.

There is a very close connection between per capita income and per capita energy production, but the obsession with net zero carbon admissions is forcing the 1.4 billion people of Africa to remain in poverty (compared to 321 million people in 1965.). Europe, that has so mismanaged its energy future, is ending fossil fuel production in their own countries while importing trillions of cubic feet of natural gas through the back door from Africa while lecturing the poor about how fossil fuels are to be prohibited.