Ben Wattenberg has a piece in the Wall St. Journal (can't link, you have to be a subscriber) about the vastly underreported fact that the World's population is not the Malthusian nightmare the Left and the Greens would have us believe. Citing a report from the United Nations Population Division titled "The Future of Fertility in Intermediate-Fertility Countries," he reports that in "this century we can expect a 'slowing of population growth rates' followed by 'slow reductions in the size of world population.'"

I just read the same general statistics in Hard Green by Peter Huber, so they've been around awhile.

The reason this is important is that it cuts the legs out from under a lot of environmentalist arguments, but, more importantly it has dire ramifications for Social Security programs which depend on an increasing work force.