Warren Sanderson: Educate the Masses

Warren Sanderson is professor of economics and of history at Stony Brook University. He is also a senior research scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria.

In 2001 and 2008, Wolfgang Lutz, Sergei Scherbov and I published world population forecasts in the journal “Nature,” in which we showed that there was a high likelihood that the world’s population would reach a peak during this century.

World population growth is coming to an end not because of an environmental calamity, but because people are voluntarily choosing to have fewer children. The medium-range U.N. forecast puts the world’s population at 9.9 billion in 2075. Our comparable forecast has it peaking in that year at around 8.9 billion....