“Rapid population acceleration and deceleration send shockwaves around the world wherever they occur and have shaped history in ways that are rarely appreciated,” the demographer Paul Morland writes in The Human Tide, his new history of demographics. These oscillations are not easy for any society to manage.
The only thing preventing the population in many countries from shrinking more quickly is that death rates are also falling, because people everywhere are living longer. Most parts of the world are witnessing sharp and sudden contractions in either birthrates or absolute population. Just as much of the world has come to see rapid population growth as normal and expected, the trends are shifting again, this time into reverse. There are now some 7.6 billion people living on the planet. It reached three billion around 1960 and then four billion around 1975.
By the late 1920s, it had hit two billion. Then, the population exploded, first in the United Kingdom and the United States, next in much of the rest of Europe, and eventually in Asia. Between the year, the human population went from about 200 million to about 600 million by 1800, it had barely hit one billion. For most of human history, the world’s population grew so slowly that for most people alive, it would have felt static.
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