His "post-civilized society" is not the stationary state of John Stuart Mill or Herman Daly, but it does have a stable population. As a young man in his twenties, Boulding took a position that we now refer to as neo-Malthusian. He argued that "the indication seems to be" that the (per-capita) income level at which the western world would only reproduce itself is one "that the actual standard of life can never reach." (1939, 107) Thirty years later, still prior to Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb (1969) and the limits-to-growth literature (e.g., Meadows, 1971), Boulding argued (1965) that it "is hard to avoid considerable pessimism" about the prospects of development, especially in countries with high birth rates, which could undermine the great potential of a post-civilized society.