The environment needs more people, not fewer

Malthus made a provocative and important point, but fortunately for us, his conclusions were far too pessimistic. When living standards began to rise globally in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and as more people moved to cities, families chose to have fewer children and to invest more in the education, nutrition, and health care of each ch

There are fewer humans than before. The demographic peak is in the past, we are a little fewer than we were before, and on a trajectory for that to continue. People speak now of an optimum number of humans; some say two billion, others four; no one really knows. It will be an experiment. All of us in balance, we the people, meaning we the living be

Honesty requires that we each recognize the need to limit procreation, consumption, and waste, but equally we must radically reduce our expectations that machines will do our work for us or that therapists can make us learned or healthy. The only solution to the environmental crisis is the shared insight of people that they would be happier if they

Kremer illustrates this by showing that as the population of the earth has increased, the rate of population growth has increased rather than declined. Had humans been a burden consuming resources, then the larger the population, the lower the quantity of resources available to each individual and the lower the rate of economic growth and thus popu

That the vast majority of alleged threats to humanity are, in fact, dwarfed by the magnitude of opportunities that exist in the twenty-first century.

have little choice but to give priority to the needs of human beings alive today while trying to preserve conditions that allow future generations to meet their needs. It is worth recognizing, however, that there is no guarantee that this tension is resolvable and the goal achievable.