What about overpopulation?
It’s an inevitable question. Conventional wisdom says that the demands of an ever-growing number of humans will soon push our planet’s resources to the limit. Surely any discussion of “the future of population” would have to focus there. But two pieces of information steered me—and this issue—in a different direction.
One is the history of failed projections about the consequences of population growth. The most notorious warning came from English economist Thomas Malthus, who in 1798 wrote: “Population, when unchecked, increased in a geometrical ratio, and subsistence for man in an arithmetical ratio.” In other words, mouths multiply more quickly than our ability to feed them—yet we are still feeding them. In his 1968 best seller, The Population Bomb, biologist Paul Ehrlich more specifically declared, “In the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon ...
