Predictions of population growth have confounded nearly everyone back to Malthus. The interesting trend is that the middle class seem to reproduce at a rate to

Predictions of population growth have confounded nearly everyone back to Malthus. The interesting trend is that the middle class seem to reproduce at a rate too low to sustain the population. Japan and Italy below the rate to sustain their populations. By 2100 the global population will probably be heading downward from a peak a few decades earlier. No one really wants to throw a global cataclysm into the stew: nuclear war, pandemic, Yellowstone eruption, asteroid strike. I remember reading predictions from a hundred years ago. (No, I'm not that old.) It missed all the mini-singularities, even the ones that had been already invented, like the automobile and the telephone.