Opinion: Is world population still ‘exploding?’

The current population of the United States is a little under 342 million; in 2080, we should peak at about 370 million.

When Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich (and his uncredited wife) wrote “The Population Bomb” in the late 1960s, he stated that world population was growing so fast that the 1970s would be marked by mass starvation and other problems caused by overpopulation and shortages of resources. Of course, that didn’t happen. Yet, into the 1980s and 1990s, he continued to make such dire predictions that he recommended “writing off” countries like India and whole geographic areas, like sub-Sharan Africa, because they were incapable of controlling their rapid population growth. Here’s what Ehrlich found so frightening.

Accelerating growth

For the 10,000 years preceding the 18th Century, world population grew at an annual rate of about 0.04 percent. The number of people inhabiting the earth was infinitesimal compared to today. By the year 1 on our calendar, there were probably fewer than 250 million people in the entire world. One thousand seven hundred years later, that number had grown to about 600 million.