The Empty Cradle. Our everyday personal experiences with traffic, sprawl and other irritants of modern life tell us there are too many people in the world and the problem is getting worse. However in truth world population growth peaked 40 years ago in 1963 and has been trending downward since. Demographers predict that absolute human population will peak at 9 billion by 2070 and then contract. Long before then, many nations will shrink in absolute size and the average age of the world's citizens will shoot up dramatically, including the fastest aging part of the world: developing countries, where for example Iraq is aging 2.5 times faster than the USA and Mexico 5 times as fast. Having averted the danger of overpopulation, the world now faces the opposite problem: an aging and declining population.
posted by stbalbach on Jun 6, 2004 - 28 comments

Boom! A master planned community. Boom! A big-box mall! Our Sprawling, Supersize Utopia. This article, by New York Times columnist David Brooks, takes a look at exploding suburbs and exurban migration. This migration is nothing new, author Joel Garreau wrote extensively about it in his 1991 book Edge Cities. The phenomonon really took off after World War II, during the period of post war prosperity, and is best represented by this famous postwar American suburb. A veritable army of "suburban sprawl critics" has emerged over the years including Jane Jacobs and James Howard Knunstler plus many others including some who are predicting the immenent demise of suburbs because of oil depletion. For Brooks the critics of suburbs "just regurgitate the same critiques decade after decade, regardless of the suburban reality flowering around them" but you can't dismiss what the architect Paolo Soleri says about American society that "we have a society that is moving very rapidly to the super-, super-, super-consumptive."
posted by thedailygrowl on Apr 30, 2004 - 28 comments

Sweden's faultering population. Sweden has a population problem and it's effecting the economy. One women has come up with a brilliant solution.
posted by Grod on Sep 19, 2002 - 25 comments

American Depop? From America to Europe to Russia, birthrates are declining -- and eventually, so will population. What are the implications? Guess who has some answers.
posted by dhartung on Jan 10, 2002 - 28 comments

U.S. population up 13% from 1990 to 281 million. Power shifts South in the House. Yikes!
posted by quirked on Dec 28, 2000 - 15 comments