What an absolute garbage graph. Look at that x axis

What about it?

The future projection part crams 83 years into the space of ten.

I see. I was looking at the second graph, whose x-axis was population. It had an unusual tick-spacing (0.3 billion), but no other surprises.

The first graph adds a couple hints that the timescale is irregular: dashing the axis between 2017 and 2050 and 2100, setting the dates in boldface, and changing the plotting style from blue bars to gray fill. They could have done more to make the axis break obvious, but they made a good effort.

Thanos is snapping his fingers s-l-o-w-l-y

So changing economic conditions, technology, and social changes have made big changes in options for women, bringing down the birth rate. However, there are still plenty of people having large families. Assuming that represents something like a religious or cultural choice more independent of other changes, their children are more likely than average to also have larger families. What that means is families that have smaller families, and continue to have smaller families, will make up a smaller portion of the population. Families that have larger families and are more likely to pass on a stable religious/cultural preference for large families, will make up a larger and larger portion of the population. So my conclusion is that population growth might essentially stop, or even regress slightly, for a few generations. But, will pick back up at exponential growth after this hiccup.

Not likely at all. There are enormous economic pressures to have smaller families as economic and technological development increases. Humans drop irrational beliefs pretty quickly when they start to directly cause harm.

Could be true. But I'd expect after a few generations that many of the economic hurdles would be diminished by advancing technology. It might mean that fewer of the children from large families passing on large family values have large families, but barring other outside forces it seems almost mathematical that more and more of the population will be from larger families.

This is probably some of the best news I've read in a long time, and oddly framed in a negative light. Perfectly expected - it's not like we haven't seen this coming for a long time now, but what's bizarre is how freaked out this article is about it. How can a small population provide for a larger one, they ask? It's like the author has completely missed the past two hundred years of industrial and technological revolution.

I'm gonna side with you. We don't need population growth, some decline and stabilization isn't bad.

It will be bad for those that depend on growth for their prosperity and I think the article is right in it will require societal change, and that change will probably be rough. But do we need 20B humans on earth?

I mean... no?

I have an idea. What if a virus is spread to innocently control global population.

Wait.

Never mind. . .

0_o

You're upmodding the guy who champions an economic model that requires endless growth and does so by using the population boom in developing countries to serve as an exploitable class. The Malthusian Overpopulation myth is easily debunked as the population challenges we have are not a matter of lack of resources but false scarcity required by said economic models. Championing said false scarcity economic models along with the malthusion overpopulation myth is quickly becoming the hallmark of ecofascist movements.

I don't agree because we can't sustain more people on the planet, but that humanity won't sustain what it has, as is already the case, fast enough or at all.

I don't think the thing that is scarce is our ability to feed ourselves.

I'm not going to argue the definition of overpopulation with you, but please think more about who you are upmodding and why I've downmodded them, please. Donnie boy there is about a year or two away from telling us he's a centrist because he's socially conservative but fiscally white supremacist. Dude was dropping all lives matter type bullshit just last month.

Oh, yes, no doubt. Broken clock and all.

If Nigeria's population is growing, while these other nations' workforce is diminishing, they should just go to Africa and ship in a bunch of ..... Oh, never mind.