In this context, I mean it as a general description of the world population over the course of the last several centuries (and last century), which exhibits a classic exponential growth curve. In the longer interview, I actually mentioned the UN population report and its current predictions of the population plateauing in the next few decades, but I cut it for space. The tricky thing about the plateau is that it still is a pretty high resource "requirement” — 10 billion people is a pretty high “carrying capacity.” Neither I nor Nasser are population alarmists, and both of us are pretty skeptical of the “solutions” that population alarmists tend to propose. But I also think that our current approach to growth doesn’t seem like it is all that sustainable.
Birthrates are dropping in most of the world; it looks like the peak population won’t get too much beyond 10 billion and then start to fall from there. That causes its own problems, though, like how to support social programs with a shrinking working population.
In this context, I mean it as a general description of the world population over the course of the last several centuries (and last century), which exhibits a classic exponential growth curve. In the longer interview, I actually mentioned the UN population report and its current predictions of the population plateauing in the next few decades, but I cut it for space. The tricky thing about the plateau is that it still is a pretty high resource "requirement” — 10 billion people is a pretty high “carrying capacity.” Neither I nor Nasser are population alarmists, and both of us are pretty skeptical of the “solutions” that population alarmists tend to propose. But I also think that our current approach to growth doesn’t seem like it is all that sustainable.
Birthrates are dropping in most of the world; it looks like the peak population won’t get too much beyond 10 billion and then start to fall from there. That causes its own problems, though, like how to support social programs with a shrinking working population.