Perhaps we should pay less attention to the public health folks then?

Yes, yes, OK, this is something of a cheap shot, this is in The Guardian after all. Further, it’s by Devi Sridhar, so v cheap. But still:

For the past 75 years in global public health, one of the major priorities has been exponential population growth and Malthusian concerns that the supply of food on the planet won’t be able to keep up. In 1951, the world’s population was 2.5 billion, which increased to 4 billion by 1975, 6.1 billion by 2000, and 8 billion by 2023. Governments in the two most populous countries, India and China, even implemented, respectively, draconian policies such as forced sterilisation and a one-child restriction.

So global public health has concentrated, for the best part of a century, on being wholly, exactly and precisely wrong then?

How they went wrong is, of course, that they ignored economics. The Malthusian concern was wrong because they didn’t bother to look at agricultural productivity. Which increased faster than the population did - that’s why we’ve now 8 billion in a world awash with food. The exponential population growth was wrong because they didn’t understand the impact of both wealth itself and the economic liberation of women (two closely linked issues of course). The two, together, leading to the collapse in fertility rates.

No, really, it’s not contraception and it’s not abortion either. It is desired fertility that has fallen. As a result of that richer world - and greater liberation - leading to there being more things to do in a life. Therefore any one of them gets done less. That’s the flip side of opportunity costs and if we’re not going to include opportunity costs in our analysis then we might be doing something but it won’t be anything sensible.

So, if global public health has been majorly wrong pretty much since the inception of the field then how much weight should we put upon current obsession in the field?

As, yes, they’re trying to ban vaping so that more people will smoke cigarettes, aren’t they?

Which does lead to an interesting question. Is there any other example of a science getting worse a century in from its inception?