Many of us who grew up in the ’60s and ’70s can recall the widespread fear surrounding the “population explosion.” This fear was propagated by mainstream media and influential books like Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb,” painting a bleak picture of a future where the world would be overrun by humans, leading to widespread starvation and environmental devastation.
However, as time has passed, it has become apparent that these doomsday predictions have not come to fruition. In fact, a more recent, less sensational forecast by the United Nations suggests quite the opposite outcome.
For years, the narrative centered around the idea that the world’s primary concern was overpopulation. From Malthus’ theories in the 18th century to the alarming predictions of “The Population Bomb” in the 1960s, the message remained consistent: an increasing population would result in heightened levels of starvation, poverty, and ecological harm. Yet, unexpectedly, a shift has occurred in demographic trends, catching the attention of the United Nations, a globally recognized authority on population projections.
Until recently, their models predicted that the global population would continue to grow throughout the 21st century, reaching a peak of nearly 11 billion by the year 2100. But in its 2022 and 2024 revisions, the U.N. quietly lowered its global population projections. The most recent estimate puts the peak at just 10.3 billion, and it comes nearly two decades earlier, around 2084.
The UN “quietly lowered” its projections, likely because it doesn’t fit the “climate catastrophe, global collapse” scenario. But facts are stubborn things – and the UN, as it happens, may well still be overestimating the drop-off.
Over the last decade, several independent teams of researchers have developed alternative population projections. Most of them show that fertility will drop faster than the U.N. is predicting. A team at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), for example, gained wide attention in 2020, when it projected that the global population would peak around 2064 at just over 9 billion and decline to about 8.8 billion by 2100.
Wolfgang Lutz, one of the world’s most respected demographers, has also published projections showing a lower and earlier population peak. Lutz’s group at the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital bases its models on education and urbanization trends, which are closely tied to fertility behavior. In a 2024 analysis of surveys involving over a million women in Sub-Saharan Africa, Lutz and his co-authors concluded that fertility rates there are falling faster than expected, especially as female education improves.
Here in the United States, though, it’s interesting to look at the demographics among Americans and see who is reproducing and who is not.
