Last week, the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs released the World Population Prospects, the international body’s annual report on the current and future state of global population.

The headline was clear: We are well past the days of worrying about having more people than the Earth can handle. The UN’s demographers now expect the number of people on the planet to peak at a bit under 10.3 billion in 2084.

That’s two years earlier than the UN was predicting peak population as recently as 2022, and considerably earlier than forecasts from just a few years before, when population wasn’t expected to peak until the 22nd century.

10.3 billion, of course, is some 2 billion more people than the planet currently holds, so population growth isn’t stopping anytime soon, but it is slowing down rapidly. Women on average now have one less child than […]