Misinformed Malthusians

An article in this week’s The Economist argues that population policy is not nearly as important as policy to make energy consumption more efficient, as the population dilemma theory provided by Malthus before the industrial revolution is, 200 years later, not surprisingly irrelevant.

As our briefing shows, the fertility rate of half the world is now 2.1 or less—the magic number that is consistent with a stable population and is usually called “the replacement rate of fertility”. Sometime between 2020 and 2050 the world’s fertility rate will fall below the global replacement rate.

I guess we should probably stop talking about a great human die-off.