> Without the vehicle, the population would be a fraction of what it is and you probably would have never been born. Personal automobile ownership is more than

> Without the vehicle, the population would be a fraction of what it is and you probably would have never been born. Personal automobile ownership is more than double what it was in 1960 (410.37/1K in 1960 vs. 831.9/1K in 2018). Needless to say, our birth rates are just a tad lower today than they were at the height of the baby boom... And that's just in the USA. Look up rates of automobile ownership throughout the world. There are massive variations between countries with similar economies and similar brithrates. And to head off the obvious explanation for the explosion of car ownership in the US being negatively correlated with population growth, notice that other developed economies also experienced a gender revolution and that this lack of strong correlation exists even if you measure car ownership at the level of households instead of at the level of individuals. The hypothesis that cars => population growth just doesn't bear out in the data, even after correcting for a lot of possible confounds. The two are, at best, uncorrelated. (Again, my post mentioned "the personal vehicle", not the ICE or carbonization of the economy more generally, which indeed enabled unparalleled growth) > That's an insane analysis. After looking at the data, I think you're completely wrong. But of course your hypothesis was not even close to "insane".