Predictions are hard to make, especially about the future. We've seen a lot of predictions, most notably from the climate-change panic-mongers on the Left, about some universal Armageddon that will be upon us if we don't stop using fossil fuels, start eating bugs, and pack ourselves into rabbit-warren "15-minute cities." The problem a lot of these prognosticators have is that they break the first law of prophecy: Always prophesy events far enough in the future that you won't live to be called on those predictions when they turn out to be wrong.
That would seem to be the tack taken by Heinz von Foerster, Patricia M. Mora, and Lawrence W. Amiot, who in November 1960 produced a research paper titled, "Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026: At this date human population will approach infinity if it grows as it has grown in the last two millennia."
Note that date. Friday, November 13, 2026. The day this is being written. And, yeah, it seems certain that if they were going to pick a day for the apocalypse, why not make it Friday the 13th?
Here's a key excerpt:
Thus, we may conclude with considerable confidence that the principle of "adequate technology," which proved to be correct for over 100 generations, will hold for at least three more. Fortunately, there is no need to strain the theory by undue further extrapolation, because-and here the pessimists erred again-our great-great-grandchildren will not starve to death. They will be squeezed to death.
In view of this uncomfortable pic-ture it is clear that, while the pessi-mists, one way or another, are "Mal-thusians by profession," the optimistsmust be "Malthusians at heart," hop-ing that at some time, somehow, some-thing will happen that will stop thisever-faster race to self-destruction.
Now, to be fair, the researchers were having a little fun with their prediction. November 13 was von Foerster's birthday, and the paper used some tongue-in-cheek humor to make a serious point about population growth. Still, here we are on Friday the 13th of 2026, and I'm looking around right now, and I sure don't see a lot of people hemming me in and hampering my breathing. Even in the most crowded portions of our major cities, people generally have room to breathe. I'm 65 years old, having grown up during a time when some were still fretting over what Paul Ehrlich called the "population bomb," and the only time I've ever felt hemmed in to the point where I found taking a deep breath a challenge was on a Tokyo commuter train during the morning rush hour. That's something of a special case.
Roger Pielke Jr., writing in this Substack, has a cogent observation.
For about three decades, the authors’ forecast had an impressive track record. Their methods implied ~2.8 billion people in 1960 and ~5.0 billion in 1990. The world had 3 billion people in 1960 and exceeded 5 billion by 1987.
After that, the methodology did not work out so well — it predicted 26.6 billion in 2020, and more than 200 billion people today, Doomsday.
The UN estimates world population in 2026 at about 8.3 billion, with a projected peak of about 10.3 billion in the 2080s. Instead of a squeeze, families across the world chose to have fewer children amid rising incomes, expanding schooling, and urbanization — see this excellent essay on the “baby bust” by Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, just out this week.
This trend is continuing, for a variety of reasons. The Western world and the developed countries of Asia appear to be leading the charge; Japan, South Korea and China are all reproducing at well below replacement rates, as are ethnic Europeans, who are being outbred by their waves of "asylum seekers," but that's a story for another time. The United States population isn't expected to drop quite as precipitously, but we have immigration, legal and illegal, to thank in part for maintaining our numbers. In fact, East Asia, including some places with the world's largest populations, are the ones that are crashing the hardest; South Korea leads the low-birthrate table with 0.80 births/woman, followed by China at 1.01. Japan is a tad higher than its neighbors at 1.14, but that's still well below the replacement rate, generally defined as 2.1 or higher.
As the old saying goes, the future belongs to those who show up for it, and much of the modern world seems to be opting out.
Here's the thing about predictions like the ones made in this 1960 paper: The researchers had little way of knowing how technological advances, especially in agriculture, would drive the increasing urbanization of global populations. Around the globe, the countryside's emptying out, and young people are moving into the cities. The incentives in child-rearing are different and growing more so; in a rural family, especially on farms, children are assets that can help with chores, care of livestock and planting/harvesting. (Believe me on this.) The incentives are for more children, not fewer. But an urban lifestyle reverses those incentives. Children are a cost that must be factored in, rather than an economic asset. And it is in large part the same significant advances in agriculture that scotched the predictions of mass famine that have also put paid to the predictions of out of control population increase.
It's always fun to look back on predictions like this one, bearing in mind that in this case the work was done a year before I was born, and I'm no spring chicken. But there's a lesson here which we should take to heart: In population, in climate, in many things, the most dire predictions never seem to come true.
