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Originally Posted by Lisnaholic
It's not hard to be misled by a statistic - it's happened to me enough times and may even be happening to me now.
A reducing birthrate sounds quite comforting, but the net number of births worldwide keeps going up, which kind of negates the good news. This isn't the precise maths, but I hope it shows the paradox behind a dwindling birthrate statistic:-
If Adam and Eve had 2 kids, they doubled the world pop in a generation. (Adam + Eve + 2= 4). Now we have 7 billion, so even if every married couple has only 1 kid (= "reducing birthrate"), that's still another 3.5 billion in one generation, which takes us way off the scale of this graph:-
I'm afraid I'm not convinced that this exponential growth is going to plateau any time soon. |
no offense but that's not only not precise math, it's completely misguided. If every breeding couple in the world only had 1 kid the population would drop notably after few generations (because in addition to being born, people also tend to die).
And that graph is stretched over a vast period of time, most of which is pre industrial. The industrial revolution is what caused the population boom because we became able to feed and provide for a lot more people.
But paradoxically, the more industrialized and rich a country becomes the more likely they are to experience a significant reduction in birth rates. To the point where countries like Germany are turning to mass immigration to try to supply the next generation of workers as their native population ages.
The trend is very clear. Here's the list of countries fertility rate.
http://worldpopulationreview.com/cou...ertility-rate/
It's also worth noting that most of the troubling and somewhat doomsday type predictions of the past regarding overpopulation have been consistently wrong. From Malthus onward. We have a long history of over estimating the threat it poses.
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Then the Industrial Revolution happened, and human population went into overdrive. It took hundreds of thousands of years for humans to hit the 1 billion mark, in 1800. We added the next billion by 1928. In 1960, we hit 3 billion. In 1975, 4 billion.
That sounds like the route to an overpopulation apocalypse, right? To many midcentury demographers, futurists, and science fiction writers, it certainly predicted one. Extending the timeline, they saw a nightmarish future ahead for humanity: human civilizations constantly on the brink of starvation, desperately crowded under horrendous conditions, draconian population control laws imposed worldwide.
Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich wrote in his best-selling 1968 book The Population Bomb, “In the 1970’s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death” because of overpopulation. (Later editions modified the sentence to read “In the 1980’s.”)
None of that ever came to pass.
The world we live in now, despite approaching a population of nearly 8 billion, looks almost nothing like the one doomsayers were anticipating. Starting in the 19th century in Britain and reaching most of the world by the end of the 20th century, birthrates plummeted — mostly because of women’s education and access to contraception, not draconian population laws.
In wealthy societies where women have opportunities outside the home, the average family size is small; in fact, it’s below replacement level (that is, on average, each set of two parents has fewer than two children, so the population shrinks over time). Called the demographic transition, it is one of the most important phenomena for understanding trends in global development.
There’s still significant debate among population researchers about the extent of the sea change in population trends. Researchers disagree on whether global populations are currently on track to start declining by midcentury. There’s also disagreement on what the ideal global population figure would be, or whether it’s morally acceptable to aim for such a figure.
While academic research seeks to nail down these questions, it’s important to be clear what is consensus among researchers. All around the world, birthrates are declining rapidly. Global population growth has been slowing since the 1960s, and global population will almost certainly start to decline. The world is absolutely not, as is sometimes claimed, on track to have 14 billion people by 2100.
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https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/fut...tion-explained