Sometime around Halloween, the United Nations will celebrate the birth of the world's 7th billion baby. As U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told world leaders in New York last month, the 7th billion baby will most likely be poor and will inhabit an earth buffeted by the ravages of global warming, desertification, and dwindling food shortages.
Sounds swell. Given this kind of apocalyptic rhetoric, it's no surprise that much of the media's focus has been on the strain of an over-populated planet, one where more than 79 million people are added each year to the human family, overwhelming already overcrowded cities, fighting it out over a dwindling pool of natural resources.
But what if the world's population actually shrank?
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