SO MUCH FOR THAT OVERPOPULATION PROBLEM: Research suggests we may actually face a declining world population in the coming years.

No, this isn’t news to those who have been paying attention. Plus: “As a less scientific but still useful, rough rule of thumb on demographic matters, I would recommend taking any prediction made by Paul Erlich in the first half of the 1970s and assuming the precise opposite has happened since.”

UPDATE: Reader Bart Hall writes: “The historically important aspect of this story is that stable or declining population leads to the utter mathematical destruction of the very sorts of social welfare and pension programs currently held to be ‘normal’ by those calling themselves ‘progressive’.” Well, most of them are basically pyramid schemes, and those don’t work when the pyramid is upside-down.