![]() The two people were barely acquainted and had little regard for each other’s work. As the conversations accumulated, the responses seemed to fall into two broad categories, each associated (at least in my mind) with one of two people, both of them Americans who lived in the 20th century. While my children were growing up, I took advantage of journalistic assignments to speak about these questions, from time to time, with experts in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. The full question is: How can we provide for everyone without making the planet uninhabitable? Bitter Rivals How can they possibly be satisfied? But that is only part of the question. Three billion more middle-class appetites. But in the hospital parking lot, this suddenly seemed unlikely. Like other parents, I want my children to be comfortable in their adult lives. ![]() Affluence is not our greatest achievement but our biggest problem. The implication is that when my daughter is my age, a sizable percentage of the world’s 10 billion people will be middle-class. All the while, economists say, the world’s development should continue, however unevenly. As a species, we will be at about “replacement level”: On average, each couple will have just enough children to replace themselves. Around this time, our population will probably begin to level off. Most demographers believe that by about 2050, that number will reach 10 billion or a bit less. Today the world has about 7.6 billion inhabitants. No one knows whether the rise can continue, or whether our current affluence can be sustained. Still, nothing like this surge of well-being has ever happened before. This enrichment has not occurred evenly or equitably: Millions upon millions are not prosperous. Hundreds of millions of people in Asia, Latin America, and Africa have lifted themselves from destitution into something like the middle class. In those four-plus decades, the global average life span has, astoundingly, risen by more than 11 years most of the increase occurred in poor places. Today the proportion has fallen to roughly one out of 10. In 1970, when I was in high school, about one out of every four people was hungry-“undernourished,” to use the term preferred today by the United Nations. ![]() To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app.
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