This little book is indeed concise, covering such a vast territory, but it is not at all superficial. It is a "mustread" for all serious students of population, by the renowned historical demographer and Past President of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, Massimo Livi-Bacci. Seasoned scholars who have pondered the big issues facing humanity will also want to take advantage of the author's vast knowledge, and check their own conclusions against Professor Livi-Bacci's careful summaries and discussions. The book has the advantage of the broad canvas that comes from the study of history-writ-large, but it also contains much valuable detailed information on the past and present.Livi-Bacci is at his best on the big current issues of the discipline-for instance, on population and development, on Malthus versus Boserup, and on increasing or decreasing returns to scale. This is a remarkable and sensitive summary of these vast and important literatures. While Livi-Bacci frequently says that he is providing "simplifications of much more complex theories," this reviewer is impressed by the careful treatment of the various sides of the issues, the amount of data and information brought to bear, and the author's willingness to do justice to conflicting points of view as well as offer his own conclusions.In terms of population and GDP, the following observation is noteworthy: The growth in per-capita GDP was virtually identical in United States and France between 1870 and 2000, at an average of 1.9 per cent per year. However, the differential population growths of these two countries changed the total GDP from a ratio of 1.4 to 1 in favour of the United States in 1870 to a ratio of 6.5 to 1 in 2000 (see p. 152). For the 28 largest less-developed countries, the period 1950-2000 can be generalized as an inverse relation between population growth and growth of GDP per capita (p. 197). That is, the countries with higher population growth had on average lower growth of per-capita GDP.The following two conclusions are particularly significant: While economies of scale have found much empirical support in the past 150 years, "beyond certain limits, demographic growth creates diseconomies of scale, reversing a trend which seems to have dominated much of human history." The limits are not those of food production, as Malthus had thought-nor of non-renewable resources, where prices have declined or remained stable, contradicting the assumption of scarcity-but the quality of "spaces" where we can live and the renewable resources of water and air quality. This reviewer agrees that the major concerns are environmental, not as natural resources but as sinks for the deposit of the products of human activity, especially manifested as climate warming.While technological improvements can solve many problems, and are ultimately unpredictable, the sheer scale is daunting. For instance, the Ehrlich equation is used to illustrate that the environmental impact in a stationary population like Italy could remain constant, ...
