Excuse me, if this is the wrong sub for this but I’m genuinly confused. According to [this graph](https://flic.kr/p/5T5hkE) I found by accident, the world population barely increased at all between 1300 and 1900. And then it suddenly took off like crazy. What caused this sudden fast increment of the world population?
In: 78
People have mentioned that human growth is exponential, but technically, it’s actually logistic growth. The more people there are, the more new babies we can produce. If every couple has 4 children, then each generation doubles in size. This is pure exponential growth. However, if the population gets too high, there aren’t enough resources to maintain it, so the growth will slow. Alternatively, deaths will start to equal the amount of growth, so the net total population growth gets lower. The maximum sustainable population is called the capacity, and factoring capacity into an exponential growth model creates a logistic growth model.
Other people have mentioned factors like medicine/transportation/etc. What these factors actually contribute to is increasing the capacity of the population. By increasing resources to maintain living population and increasing medicine to keep them from dying, the two major factors limiting the capacity are improved. Without further improvements, we will eventually reach our capacity again and growth will slow down over time.
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