Lant Pritchett<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u0391lmost a half-century ago, Robert McNamara (1977), then president of the World Bank, stoked \u201cpopulation bomb\u201d fears saying: \u201cShort of thermonuclear war itself, population growth is the gravest issue the world faces over the decades immediately ahead.\u201d With the total fertility rate in most countries already below, or rapidly nearing, replacement, such predictions seem quaint. Perhaps the new threat to humankind\u2019s very long-run prosperity (Jones 2022) and
even very long-run survival could be a depopulation bomb (Eberstadt 2022; Spears and Geruso 2025). But the most pressing \u201cnew population bomb\u201d (Goldstone 2010), one coming with near certainty in the medium-run (defined, per Keynes, as the period over which the median reader is not dead), is not total global population but aging in the richest countries and youth bulges in some developing country regions, which dramatically shifts the global composition of the labor force aged population.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u03a0\u03b7\u03b3\u03ae: Journal of Economic Perspectives<\/p>\n\n\n\n