Zachary Karabell
218 μ¢¤³£ ¬μμ¬
hundreds o millions o people are going
to starve to death in spite o any crash
programs embarked on now.”
Ehrlich’s prophecy, o course, proved
wrong, for reasons that Bricker and
Ibbitson elegantly chart in Empty Planet.
The green revolution, a series o innova-
tions in agriculture that began in the
early twentieth century, accelerated such
that crop yields expanded to meet
humankind’s needs. Moreover, govern-
ments around the world managed to
remediate the worst eects o pollution
and environmental degradation, at
least in terms o daily living standards
in multiple megacities, such as Beijing,
Cairo, Mexico City, and New Delhi.
These cities face acute challenges related
to depleted water tables and industrial
pollution, but there has been no crisis
akin to what was anticipated.
Yet visions o dystopic population
bombs remain deeply entrenched, includ-
ing at the center o global population
calculations: in the forecasts routinely
issued by the United Nations. Today, the
£ predicts that global population will
reach nearly ten billion by 2050. Judging
from the evidence presented in Morland’s
and Bricker and Ibbitson’s books, it seems
likely that this estimate is too high,
perhaps substantially. It’s not that anyone
is purposely inÇating the numbers.
Governmental and international statistical
agencies do not turn on a dime; they
use formulas and assumptions that took
years to formalize and will take years to
alter. Until very recently, the population
assumptions built into most models
accurately reÇected what was happening.
But the sudden ebb o both birthrates
and absolute population growth has
happened too quickly for the models to
adjust in real time. As Bricker andfertility falls in response to lower infant
mortality—but there is a considerable lag,
which explains why societies in the
modern world can experience such sharp
and extreme surges in population. In
other words, while infant mortality is
high, women tend to give birth to many
children, expecting at least some o them
to die before reaching maturity. When
infant mortality begins to drop, it takes
several generations before fertility does,
too. So a woman who gives birth to six
children suddenly has six children who
survive to adulthood instead of, say,
three. Her daughters might also have
six children each before the next
generation o women adjusts, deciding
to have smaller families.
The burgeoning o global population
in the past two centuries followed almost
precisely the patterns o industrialization,
modernization, and, crucially, urbaniza-
tion. It started in the United Kingdom
at the end o the nineteenth century
(hence the concerns o Malthus), before
spreading to the United States and
then France and Germany. The trend
next hit Japan, India, and China and made
its way to Latin America. It ¿nally arrived
in sub-Saharan Africa, which has seen its
population surge thanks to improvements
in medicine and sanitation but has not
yet enjoyed the full fruits o industrializa-
tion and a rapidly growing middle class.
With the population explosion came a
new wave o Malthusian fears, epitomized
by the 1968 book The Population Bomb,
by Paul Ehrlich, a biologist at Stanford
University. Ehrlich argued that plummet-
ing death rates had created an untenable
situation o too many people who could
not be fed or housed. “The battle to feed
all o humanity is over,” he wrote. “In the
1970’s the world will undergo famines—