The highest population growth rate in recorded human history was sometime between 1965 and 1970, when the population was growing at about 2.1% annually. It's down around 1.1% now. 10% hasn't been realistic since we went from 10 humans to 11 humans.
(Note: I go on research benders. This particular rabbit hole (pun intended) became really interesting from a terrifying sci-fi perspective; kind of like a reverse Children of Men. As I wrote it up, it started to feel like an apocalyptic xkcd What If.)
So, think about the sheer numbers--for a 10% growth rate, we'd need more than eight hundred million births per year. There are only 1.9 billion women of childbearing age on Earth, which means that a little under half of every woman between 15 and 49 would need to be pregnant every single year in order to make that target (a little more than that to account for women who aren't able to be pregnant for whatever reason, a little less than that to account for multiple births, let's just say those will wash out).
Let's imagine that this happened this year. Right now, we have about 132 million births annually. That would mean that we'd need about seven times the number of maternity wards, fully staffed. Five years after this unprecedented baby boom, we'd need to begin increasing the number of classrooms worldwide by a factor of 7 as well, which would mean that seven times the number of college students would have to go into education this year. We'd need to massively ramp up food production, probably starting sometime in the late 90s. We'd need to massively scale up infrastructure and housing on a Chinese scale. In 2050, our annual birth rate would equal our 2025 population, meaning we'd be adding an additional everyone who's here right now every single year.
Interestingly, this would cause a precipitous and sustained spike in our death rate, since 0.2% of women worldwide die during childbirth. This means 1.6 million women dying in childbirth every year between 2025 and 2040 (which almost exactly balances out the number of women coming to childbearing age during those years to replace them), or the first couple months of COVID happening perpetually, but for women in childbearing. Every woman would have, on average, seventeen children by age 49, and if you know 33 women under the age of 49, one of them will die in childbirth.
In 2040, we'd have to start ramping up production again as the ten percent growth rate would begin forcing (because that's obviously the only way for it to work) half of the 400 million women born in 2025 to start having their own children. Fifteen years later, do it again. Fifteen years later, do it one more time.
But you can probably stop worrying about it by that point. Studies are incredibly mixed on the total carrying capacity of Earth, ranging from 2 billion to 1.024 trillion, but a 10% growth rate would get us to even the most gigantic estimates within 50 years.
At some point, the pendulum begins swinging the other way; whether due to famine, water shortages, pandemics, climate change, or any number of other factors, there will be a huge increase to the global death rate once again. Our population would stabilize at our global carrying capacity; and from that point on, Earth's line can never go up again without the line going down first.
It's so patently ludicrous. Just total nonsense.
Edit 1: About halfway through this research bender, I realized that he was probably talking about the economy, not population. But I was having too much fun to stop. I justified it with the fact that there's really no way to sustain 10% annual economic growth without a 10% annual birth rate. You just have to have those workers, homeowners, economic entities, businesspeople, etc. being born and joining the economy.
But then the OP pointed me toward the actual quote, which honestly makes it sound like he really was talking about population.
Edit 2: Also, this wouldn't solve any economic problems! In fact, it would cause more. Half all childbearing women pregnant every year, with recovery time, that means that literally every woman would have to be pregnant every other year.
That would utterly torpedo our economy. We'd be basically losing a quarter of the workforce, all at once, and we'd never get them back.
