"The battle to feed all humanity is over ... In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines — hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." So wrote Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich nearly 40 years ago in "The Population Bomb." Of course Ehrlich was spectacularly wrong, completely missing the miracle of the adaptability of our Earth"s natural resource base and mankind's unique inventive capacity to adapt.

Ehrlich and his skeptical friends have been wrong at every turn about the amount and availability of the Earth's resources. This fear of scarcity is embedded in the Malthusian fear that population growth will outstrip the resources necessary to sustain growth.

No matter how wrong the anti-population growth cadres were about the scarcity of resources, they were successful in creating a sustained fear of the "population bomb." This fear of growth is so steeped in the world consciousness that nothing seems to be able to dislodge it. Even today, there is a strong anti-natal movement among policy elites aimed at "population stabilization."

In fact, nearly everything the anti-population growth crowd has taught is simply wrong. However, the anti-natal worriers are right that the population dramatically increased in the past century from 1.6 billion to 6 billion. While the raw number is striking, focusing on it alone covers up an even more surprising number. Nicholas Eberstadt, a scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, notes that while population nearly quadrupled over the past century, world gross domestic product quintupled in the same period. Thanks are due in particular to agronomist Norman Borlaug, Nobel Prize-winning father of the "green revolution," and his colleagues, who devised methods to increase plant productivity at rates that could keep up with astonishing population growth.

"Fears of a population time bomb have dominated environmentalists' and demographers' predictions for decades. Malthusian doom-messengers will be disconcerted by U.N. findings ... which will reveal that women are likely to bear an average of only 1.85 children in all countries by the middle of the century. Families in developing countries are beginning to limit the number of their offspring as much as those in the West," reports The Sunday Times (London).

That little number, 1.85, is very significant. It refers to "total fertility rate," or TFR, which is the average number of children born to women during their childbearing years. In order for a country to simply stay even in population, the TFR needs to be 2.1; anything below that means population decline over time.

Ben Wattenberg, who has followed this issue for decades, wrote 20 years ago in "The Birth Dearth" that the Western developed countries were in trouble because of dramatically declining TFR. For example, in Europe and Japan, the TFR in the 1980s was 1.8. In Wattenberg's recent book, "Fewer: How the New Demography of Depopulation Will Shape Our Future," he notes with alarm that in a single generation the European and Japanese TFR has declined to 1.3. "That level is unheard of, previously unimaginable." In real terms, that means European population will decline from about 728 million in 2000 to around 600 million by 2050 — about 130 million fewer people.