For most of my life, at least until the year 2000, the conventional wisdom had been that resource scarcity demanded worldwide cuts in population growth. Even though Ehrlich’s famed Population Bomb had failed to go off and Thomas Malthus has been long moldering in his grave, it was generally assumed that a high population was a liability, not an asset, and the recurring famines of the Indian subcontinent and Deng Xiaoping’s One-Child Policy seemed to be signs of the worst extremes of overpopulation.