> I don't see any serious flaws in your logic, but
>I notice that you talk in percentages while I use
>hard numbers.

Ok, so if you want hard numbers, here they are. According to some numbers I found here: http://www.npg.org/facts/us_historical_pops.htm
The rate of population growth in the US peaked in 1950 at about 2.05% per year. Using a standard "Compound Interest Calculator" (I used the one here: http://www.moneychimp.com/calculator/compound_interest_calculator.htm GO GO MONEYCHIMP!!)
I plugged in 152,271,417 (US Population in 1950, according to that website) growing at 2.05% "interest" over 56 years and got 474,402,420. That's how many people we WOULD have now if the population had continued to grow at the 2.05% per year rate it did in 1950. That's an extra 174 million and change people. That's what Stephen is talking about. Yes, growth continued. And it's still continuing. But it didn't continue on the pace many people assumed it would.

>I avoided using the term exponential growth
>because that clearly did not happen. But growth
>did.

Sure it did. But growth at a slower, more maintainable rate. I understand that things are way more crowded now than they were when you were a kid. But the point is they're not as crowded as they *could* have been (or as crowded as many doomsayers predicted they would be) nor is it unmanageably crowded today.

Here's another stat I find interesting. The world population doubled from 3 billion in 1959 to 6 billion in 1999. It's currently projected to be 9 billion by 2042, an increase of about 50% So it doubled in the 40 years from 1959 to 1999, but in the 43 years from 1999 to 2042, it's expected to only increase by another 50%.(Stats from here: http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/world.html) Yes, that's still growth. But growth at a much slower and still declining rate.