The 'Population Bomb' Won't Explode. It Will Fizzle Out.

All of us who grew up in the '60s and '70s remember the constant drumbeat of panic about the "population explosion." Driven by the legacy media, then the only media, and books like Paul Ehrlich's "The Population Bomb," the panic-mongers had many convinced that the world would soon be covered with a carpet of humans, pushing out every other creature, and that mass starvation would ensue.

Of course, none of that happened. The predictions of a population explosion haven't materialized. And, according to a quiet prediction put out by the United Nations, no less, these predictions never will materialize; quite the opposite.

For decades, we’ve been told that the world’s biggest problem is too many people. From Malthus in the 18th century to “The Population Bomb” in the 1960s, the warnings were dire: More people would mean more famine, more poverty, more environmental destruction. But something unexpected has happened. The demographic math has changed. And the United Nations, the world’s most cited authority on population forecasts, has taken notice.
Until recently, their models predicted that the global population would continue to grow throughout the 21st century, reaching a peak of nearly 11 billion by the year 2100. But in its 2022 and 2024 revisions, the U.N. quietly lowered its global population projections. The most recent estimate puts the peak at just 10.3 billion, and it comes nearly two decades earlier, around 2084.

The UN "quietly lowered" its projections, likely because it doesn't fit the "climate catastrophe, global collapse" scenario. But facts are stubborn things - and the UN, as it happens, may well still be overestimating the drop-off.

Over the last decade, several independent teams of researchers have developed alternative population projections. Most of them show that fertility will drop faster than the U.N. is predicting. A team at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), for example, gained wide attention in 2020, when it projected that the global population would peak around 2064 at just over 9 billion and decline to about 8.8 billion by 2100.
Wolfgang Lutz, one of the world’s most respected demographers, has also published projections showing a lower and earlier population peak. Lutz’s group at the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital bases its models on education and urbanization trends, which are closely tied to fertility behavior. In a 2024 analysis of surveys involving over a million women in Sub-Saharan Africa, Lutz and his co-authors concluded that fertility rates there are falling faster than expected, especially as female education improves.

Here in the United States, though, it's interesting to look at the demographics among Americans and see who is reproducing and who is not.

Democrats' $20M Study on Young Men Concludes the Obvious: Dems Are Weak, Republicans Are Strong

In the good old USA, the changing demographic trends give those of us on the pro-liberty side cause for hope: Republicans are, to put it bluntly, out-breeding Democrats and leftists in general. It's not a vast difference; in the study cited, Republicans were averaging 2.56 children per family, compared to the Democrats' 2.44. Over the course of a few generations, that's enough to make a difference.

All of the overall predictions, granted, still show an increase in population for at least the next 40 years or so, and that's fine. Global hunger is also at historic lows, and if we can keep the climate scolds out of the way, energy will continue to get cheaper and more reliable. We solve today's problems with tomorrow's technology, and the increases in human populations we will still see for the next few decades won't be starving or freezing.

Thomas Malthus and Paul Ehrlich, meanwhile, are still wrong.

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