Ezra Klein has an interview today with political scientist Jennifer Sciubba who studies demography around the world. She’s the author of a book titled “8 Billion and Counting.” But as the conversation quickly points out, we’re probably only going to be counting upward for a few more decades. Many of the world’s most populous countries already have birthrates below replacement level and the global population will likely peak around 2070 and start to decline after that.
There are two very different views about all of this. On the left, many environmentalists are eager to see those numbers decline to take the load off the world ecosystem. On the other hand, there are many on the right currently warning about the population decline as a problem for advanced countries like the US.
So, if we look at global population last century, we saw exponential growth, from 1.6 billion at the start…
