This New York Times op-ed column by Nicholas D. Kristof on the current and future sucess of global birth control is worth reading in its own right, but I figured I’d highlight perhaps its most astonishing passage, whose general fact-of-the-matter I had been more or less aware of, but which I had never seen put as precisely as this:
It took humans hundreds of thousands of years, until the year 1804, to reach the first billion [in global population]. It took another 123 years to reach two billion, in 1927. Since then, we’ve been passing these milestones like billboards along a highway. The latest billion took just a dozen years.
In 1999, the United Nations’ best projection was that the world wouldn’t pass seven billion until 2013, but we reached it two years early. Likewise, in 1999, the U.N. estimated that the world population in 2050 would be 8.9 billion, but now it projects 9.3 billion.
Hopefully, Ben’s recent anti-Malthusian optimism still applies.
