Why has the human population increased so much in the last few centuries, although we actually invented effective birth control methods?
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A main reason is the huge decrease in child mortality. It used to be the general practice to have many kids and hope some made it to adulthood (many would not). Around about 1900 into the mid-1900s, medical advancements helped reduce and almost eliminate most of the child-killing diseases. However, people still bred like they were going to lose half their children to childhood disease. This made for a very large jump in population.
The “advanced” countries, or the western countries, were first to adjust and have smaller families, but the “third-world” countries still suffered a lot of loss in their youth, which slowly improved.
We would have seen a lot more famine as humans adjusted to decreased child mortality, but advances in agriculture and other sciences raised the amount of food we humans could produce. There were still famines, still are now even, but they tend to affect poorer countries where big families were/are still desirable (hope enough children live to support you when old) and the land is somewhat marginal for agriculture (or variable climate makes the lands a lot less likely to have good yields every single year, forever).
Short answer: we stopped losing half the population before they reached adulthood and could reproduce (so they did reproduce), and we increased food production enormously so all the new numbers don’t starve. Mostly. Sort of. Lots of folks are living pretty marginal lives.
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