Population

Forget the Population Bomb. The New Fear Is a Population Implosion.

Overpopulation panic is sooooo 20th Century! Welcome to the era of depopulation dread.

Ronald Bailey | 8.24.2026 12:05 PM

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(Scaliger/Dreamstime. Illustration: Fatima Ruiz.)

Nearly six decades ago the world was allegedly in the midst of an apocalyptic "population explosion." Today the fear among some economists is the opposite: that the world in this century is on track to experience a steep global population implosion.

When the Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb in 1968, world population stood at just over 3.5 billion and the global total fertility rate was just under 5 children per woman. As a dire consequence of these trends, he declared, "The battle to feed all of humanity is over." He further predicted that in "the 1970's the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now." His solution was "population control," to be imposed "by compulsion if voluntary methods fail." Ultimately, Ehrlich asserted, "The birth rate must be brought into balance with the death rate or mankind will breed itself into oblivion."

Although millions of people have indeed died of hunger, largely as a result of disruptions caused by civil wars, Ehrlich's dire predictions of global scale famines caused by "overpopulation" failed entirely. World population today is just shy of 8.3 billion.

Population implosion is now the big worry, as can be seen in a new study by two economists, Jesús Fernández-Villaverde of the University of Pennsylvania and Patrick Norrick of Northwestern University. They claim that humanity's total fertility rate may have already fallen below the population replacement rate and that there are no signs that it will rebound. (The replacement rate is conventionally defined as each woman having 2.1 children over the course of her lifetime.)

What is even more amazing and puzzling is that some the fastest falls in fertility that they document are occurring in low- and middle-income countries and among less educated women.

This cuts........

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