ABSTRACT
Much of the talk about population and world crises these days is apocalyptic. Such talk misses two vital issues-precisely how population growth is going to impact developing areas and what can be done about it. To determine whether population growth will produce a more unstable and dangerous world in coming decades, we need to identify the precise institutional pathways through which population growth creates political crises and discuss ways to intervene in those pathways to avert the worst effects. There certainly will be crises, but there are also sensible policy responses, and our ultimate future is not written in stone.
