If you have been lying awake worrying about the population explosion, you can finally get a good night's sleep. Not only is the "explosion" fizzing out; predictions that rapid population growth would bring famines, resource shortages and environmental catastrophes have not come true either. And they are unlikely to come true in the future.
For the past two or three decades birth rates have been tumbling all over the world. In 61 countries the birth rate has declined to a level below what is needed to replace the population.
These countries represent 44 per cent of the world's population, and include virtually every developed nation, as well as almost the whole of eastern Asia. In another 34 countries in Asia and Latin America, birth rates are only a little higher than replacement level and declining rapidly.
Consequently, predictions about the future growth of the world's population keep on coming down. In 1994 the United Nations thought that the lowest likely figure for the year 2050 would be 7.9 billion, and falling. In 1996, this was revised to 7.7 billion. A few weeks ago the UN released its latest estimate, 7.3 billion.
The UN also predicts that within twenty five years populations throughout Europe will begin to decrease, and that by 2050 eastern and southern European nations will be around 20 per cent smaller than they are today.
Nevertheless, 7.3 billion people is still 1.4 billion more than the world's present population. "How will all these people be fed?" you might ask. After all, even now hundreds of millions of people are not getting enough to eat.
But hunger cannot be blamed on overpopulation. World food production has greatly outpaced population growth since the 1950s. Food is now more abundant and affordable than at any other time in history. Where people go hungry today it is because of corruption, mismanagement, trade barriers, and poverty resulting from inequalities in political power.
The massive gains in food production have come about through improved agricultural yields, rather than through big increases in the amount of land planted with crops. And advances in biotechnology promise to raise yields even further in the future, allowing the return of large areas of farmland to wildlife habitat, even while feeding billions more people.
Of course, the environmental and population activists denounce all this as a "technological fix". They favour "social engineering fixes", despite this century's sorry history of attempts to remodel human beings along the lines the activists would like.
Doomsayers like the American overpopulation guru Paul Ehrlich claim that the world has already exceeded its "carrying capacity". But while "carrying capacity" may be useful for arousing anxiety about population, it is not a very helpful scientific concept.
In just a single year, 1994, published scientific estimates of the planet's carrying capacity varied from less than 3 billion people -- which means that we are already finished -- to 44 billion, or well over 7 times the current population.
But one of the best reasons for ignoring the doomsayers is their spectacular record of failed predictions, which shows that they don't understand how the world really works.
Thirty years ago Paul Ehrlich predicted that pesticide-induced cancers would soon cause life expectancy in the United States to plummet to 42 years. (It is now around 76 years.) He also told British biologists, "If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000".
Actually, he was a gambler. In 1980 he accepted a wager offered by the economist Julian Simon, who had long ridiculed Ehrlich's predictions that overpopulation would cause terrible global shortages. Simon bet that the real price of any five natural resources of Ehrlich's own choosing would be lower in 1990 than in 1980, because recoverable reserves would continue to outstrip demand. Ehrlich lost badly.
So what was the lesson Ehrlich learnt? Did he stop making his wild predictions? Of course not. He increased his attacks on Simon's supposedly unrealistic and dangerous claims that the world did not face an overpopulation problem.
So when people like Paul Ehrlich and his followers warn that population growth will bring about a catastrophe, perhaps it is really time to have more babies.
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