Why has the human population increased so much in the last few centuries, although we actually invented effective birth control methods?

Question

Why has the human population increased so much in the last few centuries, although we actually invented effective birth control methods?

In: 211

Answer 1

There’s a certain curve as a country develops. at first, birth rates and deaths are both high-this is the ‘every women has six kids so 2 of them can become adults, with an occasional third making it’ stage of.

Then, as nutrition and medicine Improves, but old habits don’t die, there’s a period where death is low, but births are still high, where the population explodes.

Once people adjust to this new status quo, they stop having so many kids, so births and deaths are still low. In fact, as we can see in some developed nations today, births might actually be below replacement rate-like you question implies is to be expected.

The answer, therefore, relies in what amount of places are where are where on that curve. Right now, a lot of people are in the middle and right of that curve, so populations are rising rapidly in some places. In the future, as humanity as a whole moves to the right, we can expect this to stop-in fact,it’s predicted that the 12th billion person is almost certainly unlikely to be born, while the 11th billion probably won’t be, and some say even the 10th billion might not.