Welcoming earth’s 8-billionth living person 

With the planet’s population set to hit a new milestone, it would be a fool’s errand to try to predict where the actual limit to human potential lies.

Around mid-November, the world will have its 8 billionth living human being, according to estimate from the United Nations. When the milestone is reached, it will have taken the world a little less than half a century to double its population from 4 billion people in 1974. But going by current population trends, there will not be another doubling of human population any time soon. In fact, humanity’s next big challenge may well be a declining population. 

Explained | Decoding the UN report on population trends, estimates

The UN projects the world’s population to hit a peak of 10.4 billion in the 2080s. That is when the negative effect of falling fertility rates on population growth is projected to kick in. Global fertility rates have declined since the 1950s, from around 4.5 births per woman to below 2.4 births per woman in 2020, and it is expected to drop below the replacement fertility rate soon. The replacement fertility rate, which is 2.1 births per woman, is the minimum required to simply maintain the human population. In many countries in the West, fertility rates have already dropped below the replacement level fertility. In fact, two-thirds of the world population lives in countries where fertility rates are below replacement rate. Even in India, the total fertility rate has dropped below 2.1 births per woman. 

Yet, amid sharply falling fertility levels and the clear risk of a shrinking human population, the consensus view today is that the human population hitting 8 billion is a cause for worry. The seeds of this fear towards rising human population were sown back in the 18th century by British economist Thomas Malthus. Malthus argued that rising human population would put enormous pressure on the earth’s limited resources and that nature would keep a check on it. Whenever human population surpassed the earth’s ability to feed them, he predicted, famines would wipe out enough people to restore equilibrium. Malthus, in effect, believed that humanity’s failure to keep its population in check would lead to poor living standards. But today, more than two centuries since Malthus’s prediction, the earth’s population is eight times what it was when Malthus made his dire predictions and living standards have improved massively. 

After Malthus, many other social scientists have come up with regular warnings about the destructive impact of human population on the planet and the limits to economic growth. Yet their predictions, just like the predictions of Malthus, have repeatedly failed to come true. The most notable among these doomsayers was American biologist Paul Ehrlich who in his 1968 book  The Population Bomb predicted that “hundreds of millions of people” would starve to death in the following decade. But, to cite one factor, the Green Revolution ensured that such a sad catastrophe would not happen.  

Explained | Where is population growth taking place?

So, what is it about human civilisation that has ensured that population doomsayers are proven wrong time and again? The answer lies in the strong financial incentives that the market economy offers to people across the globe to preserve the earth’s scarce resources and also to extract the most out of these scarce resources.