[pfdietz]

Is "roughly exponential growth" being used as a synonym for "growth"?

Exponential is used as a scare word. It's not just growth, it's exponential growth! Run and scream in fright! Because if you don't do what I say you must do, we are exponentially doomed. Dooooomed!

[Aurornis]

I've done enough computer science work to be afraid of exponential growth.

[disconcision]

i can't speak for everyone, but in the above assertion am using 'roughly exponential' to mean that world population between say 1880 and 1960 followed a curve that is, roughly, exponential, in the technical sense. much of the discourse 50 years ago, e.g. the population bomb, was predicated on this observation.

[pfdietz]

Rough is doing heavy lifting there, so much so that I suggest it doesn't have any meaning except to say the population was growing. The growth from 1980 to 1960 certainly was not exponential: the percentage growth per year was all over the place, varying on the same time scale as the doubling time (or even faster).

https://ourworldindata.org/cdn-cgi/imagedelivery/qLq-8BTgXU8...

I suspect it's not a coincidence that the population bomb scare occurred right after the collapse of European colonialism, although teasing out the causation could be interesting.