Robert Engelmann worries about overpopulation. Betsy Hartmann counters:
Family size has fallen to a global average of 2.45 children and is projected to fall to two or less in the next decades. The main reason why global population is projected to increase to 9 billion by 2050, and possibly 10 billion by 2100 (a high projection that is disputed by demographers), is that currently there exists a large cohort of young people of reproductive age. High fertility, however, persists in only a few countries, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, because of deep class and gender inequalities and the failure of elites to invest in education, health care, and other social services, including high quality family planning. Population alarmism threatens to erode the progress made since the 1994 Cairo conference in moving the family planning field away from top-down and coercive population control programs toward a focus on reproductive health and rights.
The Dish 