China passes a billion
On October 27th, 1982, the People's Republic of China announced that its population had passed one billion, which at the start of the 19th Century was estimated to be the population of the whole world. That figure has risen steady following the Industrial Revolution and the development of modern medicine and sanitation enabled by the wealth it generated. It passed 3 billion in 1959, and since the 1970s has risen by a billion roughly very 12 years. It passed 6 billon in 1999, then 7 billion in 2011, and currently stands at 7.742 billion.
Some commentators doubt the planet can support such numbers. Thomas Malthus predicted starvation because a finite amount of land could not support a population that could grow without limit. Paul and Anne Erlich, latter-day Malthusians, published "The Population Bomb" in 1968, predicting widespread famine in the 1970s and 80s. There have been many calls for the world to limit its population growth, and China responded with its 'one child' policy in 1979, a policy that lasted, with modifications, until 2015. The policy caused many social problems and was widely unpopular. It led to sex-selective abortions and even infanticide, given the Chinese cultural preference for at least one male child. Sir David Attenborough is among the voices that today call stridently for limits to be imposed.
Obviously, an increased population will need more food and more drinkable water. It will consume more resources, need more houses, light more fires, drive more cars, eat more meat. Yet the result so far is that the world has largely been able to cope. The Green Revolution of the 1960s grew food faster than population increases, and as the world has been growing richer following globalized free trade, fertility has declined. In most European countries the birth rate is below the renewal rate, and it is estimated that by 2030, this will apply to two-thirds of the world's countries.
The transfer of advanced-country technology to poorer ones means that fewer children die in infancy, and mothers respond by having fewer children. As countries grow richer through industrialization and globalization, people no longer need the economic contribution of children to the family budget, and can afford to put them into education instead of work. As countries can afford social services such as pensions, parents no longer depend on their children to support them in old age. Education, particularly of women, leads to declining fertility rates.
Population growth is slowing. Although alarmist projections speak of 20 billion by 2050, and even 50 billion by 2100, The UN population forecast of 2017 suggested that the world's population is flattening, like a Kuznets Curve, as we near the "end of high fertility." Population studies suggest the world's numbers might stabilize at around 10 billion, before declining from that figure.
The question is whether the world can support that number, and the answer seems to be yes. Despite the increases in population, the number of people living in extreme poverty globally shows a stable decline. The global number of famine-related deaths has declined, and food supply per person has increased with population growth. New technologies are emerging to enable those numbers to be fed with less land, and to purify seawater to drinking quality in large quantities. Renewable energy sources will cut the emissions that people produce when they work and travel, and the products people use are being made with fewer natural resources.
It is by no means a Pollyanna picture, and could be upset, for example, by medical breakthroughs that greatly increase lifespan, or by political conflicts that thwart the spread of new technologies. But the balance so far is on the side of Julian Simon, who regarded humans as 'The Ultimate Resource,' capable of solving their problems, and it is against the doomsayers who treat human beings as if they were a form of pollution.