In 1798, Thomas Malthus, an English economist and demographer, published “An Essay on the Principle of Population,” in which he predicted that human population growth would eventually exceed the Earth’s ability to provide enough food for everyone. This would lead to famine, disease, war and other associated travails. So far, that hasn’t happened.
In 1968, 170 years later, Paul Ehrlich published a book titled, The Population Bomb, another doomsaying work predicting that human fecundity would soon drain the planet’s resources and send Earthlings into a death spiral. Widespread starvation, Ehrlich argued, was both inevitable and imminent. But that bomb hasn’t gone off either.
Read More: We’ve Been Worried About Overpopulation for Millennia
This past November, the U.N. announced that Earth’s population had reached eight billion. And we’re still here. On top of that, according to the World Bank, the number of people living in extreme poverty has been steadily decreasing ...
