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>They were spot-on about the birthrates though.

Not sure that one counts. They missed the important trend, which was that the rate of increase was slowing, and that it was slowing more quickly than thought possible. Off by "1.2 Bangladeshes" isn't really an A+ (or a B+). But then I remember still seeing yearly articles about how overpopulation was going to turn the future into a nightmarish hellscape at least through the mid-1990s, perhaps out of habit they'd been cultivating since the 1960s.



Bad Religion had a song Ten in 2010 that predicted 10 billion people by 2010. Not only were they wrong about the total population, they were overly pessimistic about the ability of societies to feed and support that many people.


I'm highly confident we never reach 10 billion. There's a somewhat (small, but realistic) chance we never reach 9 billion. This is even without anything quite so dramatic as a dinosaur-killer meteor. And it's not even slightly good.




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