The end is always nigh

Typically for my generation, I woke repeatedly as a kid with my pyjamas soaked in sweat because I’d had yet another nightmare about nuclear war. While I rarely dream about mushroom clouds any more, a dark cloud of one shape or another has dogged me like a sooty, vaporous stray for my entire life.

For my conservative classmates in the mid-1960s, American democracy was on the cusp of being overtaken by communism, even if they weren’t sure what that bogeyman was. Yet don’t imagine liberals like my parents were by contrast keeping sensibly calm and carrying on. The left has manfully merchandised the end of the world since I can remember.

In 1968, Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb exploded as an international bestseller, promoting a doomsday paradigm to which I proved especially susceptible. At 16, I spent a whole semester of independent study writing and researching an essay on ‘Motivational aspects of population growth’, kicking off what would become a lifelong preoccupation with demography.