Suddenly, We Don’t Have Enough People
The stark implications of the global fertility collapse
Just a generation or so ago, a book entitled The Population Bomb, by Paul Ehrlich, sold millions of copies, continuing a long tradition of Malthusian doomsday forecasts. Ehrlich predicted that the world would soon be overpopulated, resulting in mass starvation and death. But the dire predictions did not come to pass. Instead, we face a new and greatly underappreciated risk: population collapse.
Malthulsian Doomdaying
There is a long history of Malthusian doomsdaying. The term itself is derived from the name of Thomas Robert Malthus, who at the beginning of the 19th century, famously theorized that since the population grew geometrically while food output grew linearly, mass starvation was an inevitable outcome for much of humanity.
Malthus made this prediction at a time when the population had just crossed 1 billion. Ehrlich’s book was released in 1968, by which time the population had more than tripled, yet no worldwide famines materialized. On the contrary, the global population has since more than doubled again, to some 8 billion people. Meanwhile, the global incidence of hunger and the frequency and severity of famines has declined dramatically.
