Judging by the headlines, Ted Turner, who died earlier this month at age 87, will be remembered as an adventurer and visionary: creator of CNN, and with it the 24-hour news cycle, the inventor of the satellite-supported national TV superstation, a distinguished sailor, a generous conservationist, and a reputed playboy. He adored women so much that he produced five children with them, incidentally breaking faith with one of his core values: population control.
When Turner was born on the eve of the Second World War, just over two billion people inhabited the earth. That number increased three-fold by 2000. For Turner, who had internalized the cataclysmic “overpopulation” fears of the Cold War, such growth in living, breathing souls was not a success, but a looming catastrophe. His goal was to first “stabilize the population,” then ideally reduce it to around two billion.
Toward his vision of a world with fewer children, Turner was a generous donor to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), Planned Parenthood, and the Guttmacher Institute. In 2004, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America presented him with the Margaret Sanger Award, which recognizes “leadership, excellence, and outstanding contributions to the reproductive health and rights movement.”
Turner wasn’t the only billionaire philanthropist pouring money into population control. In 2009, he met privately in New York City with Bill Gates, David Rockefeller, George Soros, Warren Buffett, and others to discuss how they could use their wealth to curb overpopulation and fight climate change. They were known as the “Good Club,” The Guardian reported, and they wanted to “save the world.”
Despite their anxieties about other people’s fecundity, the neo-Malthusian billionaires in attendance had, like Turner, been quite fruitful in their own reproductive behavior: Rockefeller had six children; Soros had five; and Gates and Buffett each had three. While sources described Gates as the “most impressive” speaker, Turner was the most outspoken and attempted to “dominate” the meeting.
His outspoken rhetoric certainly wasn’t limited to elite secret gatherings. At a climate luncheon in 2010, he urged world leaders to adopt China’s one-child policy, insisting that, “If we’re going to be here [as a species] 5,000 years from now, we’re not going to do it with seven billion people.”
While lauded as an optimist, Turner believed humans were headed for a nightmare future unless they took drastic action against alleged overpopulation and climate change. He predicted a doomsday scenario of civilizational collapse, with famine, death, cannibalism, and very few survivors living in a “failed state like Somalia or Sudan.” The earth’s temperature is rising, he claimed, because “too many people are using too much stuff.”
Meanwhile, as an adventurer, he afforded himself a lavish and abundant lifestyle, flying his Bombardier Challenger 300 private jet a distance of nearly 80,000 miles in 2022 alone. His aircraft that year surpassed the combined emissions of 34 average Americans.
Turner’s hypocritical and apocalyptic mindset reflected the zero-sum ideology of twentieth-century neo-Malthusians such as Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, co-author of the 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb, which boldly asserted that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the 1970s due to overpopulation. Turner admired Ehrlich and derived his two-billion world population ideal from Ehrlich’s estimation of earth’s “carrying capacity.”
This outlook received bipartisan support in Washington throughout the 1960s and 1970s among “Rockefeller Republicans” like Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger as well as environmentalist Democrats like Jimmy Carter. Neo-Malthusian ideas were institutionalized within the State Department and USAID, operating under the misguided assumption that rapid population growth inhibited economic development and constituted a threat to US national security and economic interests. Food aid was even conditioned on developing countries’ willingness to implement population control policies.
The neo-Malthusian consensus wasn’t shattered until the Reagan administration declared rapid population growth a “neutral phenomenon” rather than a barrier to development at the UN’s 1984 World Population Conference in Mexico City. Economist Julian Simon, who argued that “the ultimate resource is people,” was instrumental in shaping the Reagan administration’s renewed approach to population policy.
In 1990, Simon triumphed over Paul Ehrlich in a ten-year wager on the prices of five metals. Ehrlich, betting that population pressures would diminish resources and spike commodity prices, lost to Simon’s more optimistic view that human knowledge, innovation, and resource substitution would produce greater abundance and lower prices over time.
Simon is no less correct today than he was in 1980 when his wager against Ehrlich began. The “time prices” of basic commodities — denoting the amount of time someone must work to earn enough money to purchase a given item — have continued to shrink, owing much to population growth and the expansion of the rule of law, property rights, and economic freedom.
Contrary to the assumptions of Turner and the neo-Malthusians, population growth hasn’t exacerbated famine, poverty, and disease. Nor has it necessarily hastened global warming. As economists Dean Spears and Michael Geruso documented in their 2025 book After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People, no theoretical or historical relationship exists between population size and particulate air pollution. Whether the human population stabilizes or declines, global warming is forecast to proceed. “Billions of lives lived would make a small difference to this big problem,” they said.
Addressing and overcoming challenges like climate change requires sustained technological progress, which is enabled by more free minds, not fewer. Turner wanted to limit both human numbers and human freedom, but his Malthusian views embodied a discredited consensus that applied a yeast-in-a-petri-dish model to the study of human population.
This dismal perspective, which assumes people will breed themselves into oblivion, doesn’t take into account the better angels of our nature: our rationality, ingenuity, and adaptability unparalleled by any other species. But it reveals a lot about how Malthusians think about their fellow humans — not as sovereign individuals possessing inherent rights and dignity, but rather as an infestation requiring systemic control. As Julian Simon pointed out, this worldview isn’t predicated on scientific facts but on “value judgments about the worth of human life.”
Simon’s intellectual archnemesis, Paul Ehrlich, preceded Turner in death by less than two months. These two Malthusian giants departed our resourceful earth at a time when roughly two-thirds of people live in countries with sub-replacement fertility rates, meaning the average woman is having fewer than 2.1 children. The depopulation they so fervently sought — and funded — has at last become a reality.
But it comes at a price. Countries are not only facing spiraling debt and deficits spurred by population aging and worker shortages, but also a dearth of love, care, and support for the elderly. In countries like Japan, those who fulfilled Turner’s wish and had only one child — or perhaps none — are increasingly dying alone and undiscovered for days, weeks, or even months. It’s a sad and overlooked outcome of depopulation, but luckily for Turner, who suffered from Lewy body dementia, he had five children, along with billions of dollars, to support him in his final years of decline and dependency.