POPULATION BOMB Epic Fail. “Which is quite a contrast from the old days when Ehrlich’s book, The Population Bomb, was a worldwide best-seller, national and international population control organizations and lobbies were set up, and so forth. In the meantime, global fertility rates have fallen so fast that we can now foresee the peak of global population a few decades out, after which we will likely start to see the world’s population start to shrink fairly dramatically. A few people in the media have started to notice: Reuters notes that falling population may present more serious social problems than rising population. (How will we pay for our welfare states, to example?)” How, indeed?