> [For once, Pollyanna is against the consensus]
>
> COMMENT & ANALYSIS: Age shall not weary them: Horror stories about the
> dire consequences of demographic changes in western societies are
> exaggerated
>
> Financial Times, Feb 7, 2001
>
> By MARTIN WOLF
>
> Economics is widely known as the dismal science. It owes this sobriquet to
> the work of Thomas Malthus, an English economist who lived in the first
> part of the 19th century. Malthus believed that, in the long run,
> increases in population would outrun our ability to produce additional
> food. In this at least, Malthus has been proved utterly wrong.
>
> Nothing daunted, many economists now worry about the exact opposite:
> that populations are not growing fast enough. The combination of steep
> declines in birth rates with rising life expectancies is, they argue,
> creating a crisis of ageing. Happily, these anti-Malthusians are likely to
> be proved quite as wrong as Malthus himself.
>
> At the global level, this anti-Malthusian story still looks absurd. The
> growth rate of the world population is slowing but remains positive.
> According to forecasts from the US Bureau of the Census, the world's
> population will rise from just over 6bn today to just over 9bn by the
> middle of this century. But in developed countries, the picture is already
> different. Population is forecast to rise very slowly, from 1,190m this
> year to 1,240m in 2030, before falling to 1,220m in 2050.
***********
He definitely needs to look at Ekins work; why is it "they" always ignore the ecological consequences of "wealth" as defined in the west. I hate hair shirts too, but something is seriously amiss if there is not major technological change that substantially lowers the environmental impacts per unit of consumption. <http://www.unu.edu/unupress/unupbooks/80901e/80901E08.htm> Full text at:
<http://www.unu.edu/unupress/unupbooks/80901e/80901E00.htm#Contents>
Ian