Happy new year, 2024, o world of 8 billion

On New Year’s Day, the world population was more than 8 billion, just a little bit up on 7.9 billion a year ago.

That’s according to a US Census Bureau projection.

It sounds like small potatoes, but the increase of 75 million or 0.95 per cent is not insignificant. It tells us something about growth and sentiment in the world’s biggest economy, the United States.

Brookings demographer William Frey is quoted by AP to say that if this growth rate continued until 2030, it would make the 2020s the slowest-growing decade in US history.

In fact, the 2020s would overtake the 1930s in terms of sluggish rates. But the 1930s were the age of the Great Depression. One has to wonder what’s making Americans so despondent in the 2020s.