More Cohen

Joel Cohen, who wrote 'How many people can the earth support', and is different to the Joel Cohen who is half of the Cohen brothers movie directing team (Fargo, The Big Lebowski, No Country for Old Men etc) had a recent Commentary published in Nature suggesting one important step we could make in controlling world population growth: Make Secondary Education Universal. It's a short article, only a couple of pages, and well worth a quick read.

Universal, high-quality primary and secondary education is achievable within 25 years. Educating all children well is a worthwhile, affordable and achievable strategy to develop people who can cope with problems foreseen and unforeseen.

And just to follow up on class, if everyone on earth lived an American lifestyle then, under current technology at least, it seems unlikely the earth could support more than 2 billion people. As I mentioned, and you are hopefully aware, we are currently heading towards 7 billion....