One of the most startling news stories of the season is the dispatch on page one of yesterday’s the New York Times warning that there might be too many Africans. This came in an account of a new forecast on world population issued by the United Nations, which is now projecting that a global population that the Times reports was “long expected to stabilize just above nine billion in the middle of the century” will “keep growing and may hit 10.1 billion by the year 2100.” It predicts that the population of Africa could triple in this century to 3.6 billion — “a sobering forecast for a continent already struggling to provide food and water for its people.”

What in the world does the Times have against the Africans? Population density on the African continent, after all, is, at 65 persons a square mile, one of the lowest on the planet, according to About.com, whose figure we cite because About is issued by another unit of the New York Times Company. It reports that South America has 73 people a square mile, Europe 134, and Asia 203. It makes one wonder why the Times would begrudge the Africans the prospects for growth that are reported by the United Nations. If the continent is “already struggling to provide food and water for its people,” after all, maybe the reason is that it has not too many people but too few.

The error in the Times story is an example of how even the most intelligent of analysts can get into trouble on the population story. One famous example was a dispatch issued in August 2001 by the magazine Nature, which published a forecast that the 21^st century would be the one in which the number of people on the planet would likely stop growing. The authors — Wolfgang Lutz, Warren Sanderson, and Sergei Scherboy — reckoned there was “around an 85% chance that the world’s population will stop growing before the end of the century.” The triumvirate concluded that “the prospect of an end to world population growth is welcome news for efforts towards sustainable development.”

Now the new report from the United Nations suggests that the prediction of Messrs. Lutz, Sanderson, and Scherboy was wrong and that population growth will not peak this century but will keep growing. The United Nations, like the writers for Nature, seems to be under the impression that this is bad news, not good. One can expect that the United Nations report will be used as grist for a vast campaign to increase funding for the population control — and that will lead to a feud between who gets the blessing of more people. Will it be the rich countries, whose populations are growing the slowest or, in the saddest cases, shrinking? Or will it be the poor countries of Africa and Asia who are racing to build their wealth by building their populations?

And who is going to decide which countries or continents get to have babies? If it’s going to be the United Nations, the way to think of the world body will be as a kind of global death panel. Who wants to sit on that board and try to allocate vast population control funds to see who be permitted, and who won’t, the luxury of large families? And why is this happening at all on a planet where, according to the New York Times’ About.com, 90% of the population lives on 10% of the land? The fact is that the religious sages figured out long ago that population growth is good. It doesn’t matter whether it is Africans or Americans or Europeans or Asians. The fear of population growth is a superstition of a secular age, and what an irony that it is one of the principle products of a United Nations that was supposed to bring the world together.