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Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

     it's an extrapolation of a consistent and 
     systematic trend

It's a shitty extrapolation to me, just because the fertility rate has been dropping since the sixties (a period of economic growth, following after a world war btw).

2000 years ago the world population was somewhere around 300 million people. Today we are at 6.94 billion people. That's clearly exponential growth.

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And equally, from a resource utilisation perspective, the world is enormously more sustainable at a population level of 300m than of 6.94b; a long-term downward trend in population would be a net environmental win and is preferable as a means of achieving sustainability to a series of resource wars with mortality rates to make Russia in 1942 look pleasant.

The downside is that our economies and our social security systems are somewhat designed around the assumption of rising population. How to square this circle as peacefully and comfortably as possible is the challenge...

> 2000 years ago the world population was somewhere around 300 million people. Today we are at 6.94 billion people. That's clearly exponential growth.

You can identify exponential growth from two data points? (Yes, population growth is exponential - I'm just pointing out that the data given doesn't "prove" that.)

The trend in question is recent, and only in some parts of the world, so of course the trend over 2000 years is different. That's a no brainer and does nothing to 'combat' the point of the article.

I'm wondering why this article is making so many people really angry and making them state the obvious in attempts to shoot it down. Clearly it really got under some folks' skins. 'Shitty' indeed.

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