New Population Bomb: The Four Megatrends That Will Change the World, The

Abstract

Forty-two years ago, the biologist Paul Ehrlich warned in The Population Bomb that mass starvation would strike in the 1970s and 1980s, with the world's population outpacing the production of food and other critical resources. Thanks to innovations and efforts such as the green revolution in farming and the widespread adoption of family planning, Ehrlich's worst fears did not come to pass. In fact, since the 1970s, global economic output has increased and fertility has fallen dramatically, especially in developing countries. The United Nations Population Division now projects that global population will nearly halt by 2050. By that date, the world's population will have stabilized at 9.15 billion people, according to the medium growth variant of the UN's authoritative population database World Population Prospects: The 2008 Revision. (Today's global population is 6.83 billion.) Barring a cataclysmic climate crisis or a complete failure to recover from the current economic malaise, global economic output is expected to increase by two to three percent per year, meaning that global income will increase far more than population over the next four decades.

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