The Club of Rome’s monumental book The Limits to Growth came out in 1972, with a picture of the earth on its cover. The book, written by a team of scientists, predicted disastrous shortages and mass starvation due to population pressure. Despite scientific critics of the Club of Rome’s methods, the public was ready to believe the dire forecast.

The great population scare led to various birth-control efforts around the world, notably to the “one-child policy” instituted in China in 1979. Partly due to such efforts, as well as to a change in family values, the rate of growth of the world’s population, began a long decline, to 1.1 per cent in 2005. That gradual decline led to gradual loss of concern about limits to growth. Commodity prices fell, too.

Today, we remain mostly unconcerned about global population growth. But, in the last ten years or so, we have become concerned about something else: rapid world economic growth. While it may seem that no image in the last decade was so dramatic as the first photo of the earth from space, think again.

Try searching YouTube, for example, on Greenland ice. More generally, the Internet gives a sense of vastness to the world’s economic activity that was never available before. The ability to communicate via email to everyone in the world creates a sense of the world’s smallness relative to the abundance of people in it.

We have seen photographs of hurricane and typhoon activity due to global warming, affecting people in Louisiana or Myanmar. We have seen devastation from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, interpreted as a sign of crowding at the coasts.

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