By Amir Iraji

For decades, the dominant narrative surrounding population growth has been one of alarm. Thinkers like Malthus warned that population growth would cause mass starvation and ecological collapse. Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb famously predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve in the 1970s due to overpopulation.

Today, concerns are shifting. Many of the same governments that once feared overpopulation are now worried about declining birth rates. Countries like Japan, South Korea, and much of Europe struggle with economic stagnation and aging populations. Even China—after enforcing its coercive One-Child Policy—is now encouraging larger families. This shift raises an important question: where did the fear of overpopulation come from, and was it ever justified?

This fear is rooted in the old zero-sum view—the belief that wealth and resources are fixed, and that a growing population simply means dividing those resources into smaller portions. Aristotle, for example, argued that if a city’s population grew too large for people to know one another, resources would be depleted.

Today, the evidence is plain: if the old theory were correct, modern megacities would be dystopian wastelands. Yet cities like Tokyo, New York, and London are among the wealthiest and most dynamic places in history. So why does this zero-sum logic persist—not only among ordinary people, who intuitively believe it, but also among so-called experts, especially economists who should know better?

The reason lies in their static view of human societies—the static fallacy. Their assumptions are based on static models, borrowed from the natural sciences, where variables and outcomes can be predicted with a high degree of certainty. In physics or biology, an increase in a certain factor........

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