Nobody is talking about "huge birth rates."
We're simply talking about birth rates over 2.1.
The west, with the exception of the USA and Israel, is well below that number.
The Third World is rapidly approaching it, far more rapidly than the First World did, despite uninformed doomsayers' protestations to the contrary.
Once the global fertility rate is under 2.1, which will likely happen by 2050, populations will begin declining rapidly as the elderly die off, and life expectancy no longer increases.
There was, is and will be a ready supply of humanity ready to fill in the gap of those populations that decline to reproduce at a replacement rate.
Not if global fertility rates don't stop dropping precipitously. Which is the author's point.
More a threat to their particular way of life than a threat to “humanity” - but once again that isn't the argument the author is making.
I really do not think you grasp the argument the author (me) is making.
I AM talking “huge birth rates”, they are not associated with economic growth but with being an economic basket case.
A decline in the huge birth rates of the Third World, to something more rational, is a positive sign, not a sign of impending doom.
For the majority of humanities time on Earth the human population was less than a billion people. From one billion to two billion took more time than from two to three, which took more time than from three billion to four billion, etc, etc.
We are at 7 billion now, and can expect less time to pass before we reach 8 billion than the time it took to go from 6 billion to 7.
You are delusional if you think going down to 6 billion is a more likely scenario or a bigger threat than hitting 8 billion (and growing).
Absolutely delusional.