No, Africa is not a chronically impoverished continent doomed to forever grow its population while lacking the resources to sustain it the continent is dynamic, its economies are in flux, and the birth rates are falling rapidly. No, fertility rates are not astronomically high in developing countries many of them are at or below replacement rate. No, we are not going to keep adding bodies until the world is groaning at the weight of eleven billion of us and more nine billion is probably closer to the truth, before the population starts to decline. In their book, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline, they aim to dismantle several common population myths: And many people are still in agreement with his assessment.ĭarrell Bricker and John Ibbitson make a case that the global population is actually looking at the very opposite problem: a population bust rather than a bomb. Sixty years later, the fact that nearly all of his predictions have failed to come true did not stop the now ninety-year-old from doubling-down on the disaster of over-population on 60 Minutes just last month. Surely you have heard the nutshell of his argument before: the earth and its resources simply cannot sustain humanity’s ever-growing population. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich published his bestselling book, The Population Bomb, which predicted the apocalyptic death of millions in the 70s and 80s as the result of over-population.
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