[From "The Bright Side of the Plague," a review of The Black Death and the Transformation of the West by David Herlithy. This review by Joel E. Cohen was published in The New York Review, March 4, 1999.]

…In the twentieth century, the supply of people has surged to unprecedented levels. The absolute number of people has nearly quadrupled, from perhaps 1.6 billion at the beginning of the century to just over 6 billion expected by its end. Since World War II, the growth rate of global population has been, and remains, higher than ever before in history. To judge by the preventable ills of the human population today, people collectively are valued cheaply. Three quarters of a billion people are chronically undernourished; at least another billion are malnourished; a billion adults are illiterate; perhaps two billion people are infected with the tuberculosis bacillus (with hundreds of millions more under threat from other infectious diseases); and roughly four fifths of the world's population live on average annual incomes of approximately $1,100…

Updated Tuesday, January 02, 2001