Feed on
Posts
Comments

There is not a single country in the world that has a higher birth rate today than it had in 1960.

That is from Matt Ridley’s fantastic book, The Rational Optimist. Here is another bit … that birth rate decline has been especially pronounced in … poor countries. Very good estimates now see world population peaking at just over 9 billion this century and then either falling or stabilizing. I’ll reserve comment on the implications of this until a later post.

One Response to “Fun Facts to Know and Tell: Population Edition”

  1. “Overpopulation” is indeed not the problem many people think; indeed, there are important reasons WHY birth rates have been declining (and UNDER-population is becoming a problem for some countries).
    (This is discussed in my own 2009 book, THE CASE FOR RATIONAL OPTIMISM, which develops the case for optimism over a rather broader range of subject areas than Ridley’s. See http://www.fsrcoin.com/k.htm.)

Leave a Reply