00:03for half a century we were told a terrifying story too many people not enough food a planet
00:10on the edge of collapse in 1968 a best-selling book called the population bomb warned that in
00:17the 1970s hundreds of millions of people would starve to death no matter what we did it didn't
00:24happen instead something extraordinary did scientists like Norman Borlaug bred new high
00:31yield wheat and rice harvests surged across Mexico India and Pakistan and Borlaug was awarded the
00:38Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 since 1968 the world's population has more than doubled from about three
00:47and a half billion to over eight billion yet the food available per person rose from about
00:522200 calories a day to nearly 3,000 famine deaths collapsed from tens of millions in the 1960s to
01:00around 1 million in the 2010s even with billions more people on earth extreme poverty fell from 38
01:08percent of humanity in 1990 to under nine percent by 2019 in 1980 the economist Julian Simon made a
01:17famous bet with the biologist Paul Ehrlich Ehrlich picked five metals he expected to grow scarce
01:22by 1990 all five were cheaper Simon won Simon's insight was simple people are not just mouths
01:31their minds more minds mean more ideas more inventions more solutions he called the human mind the ultimate
01:39resource and space give every person on earth one square meter and all eight billion of us would fit in
01:46an
01:46area smaller than Puerto Rico now the real plot twist global fertility has fallen from about five
01:54children per woman in the 1960s to around 2.25 today more than half of all countries are already below
02:01the
02:01replacement level of 2.1 South Korea's fertility rate hit 0.72 in 2023 China Italy and Spain have ultra
02:11low
02:11fertility to in parts of Asia and Europe schools are closing for lack of children the United Nations
02:19now projects that humanity will peak at around 10.3 billion in the mid 2080s and then begin to decline
02:26the population bomb never exploded the real challenge of our century isn't too many people it may be too few
02:34every new human is a new mind a new idea a new chance to build a better world the future
02:41doesn't need
02:41fewer of us it needs all of us
