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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Lots of reasons, as people have mentioned. Antibiotics, sanitation, food abundance, world-wide aggregate prosperity, advances in medicine at-large. I work in a hospital and the efforts that are put into maintaining someone alive, despite significant health problems, is fascinating. Birth control is very much a sideline issue regarding population growth as it is optional.
Cultural facts go into population growth, namely that certain cultures or cults encourage having children. Then those in the same culture subsequently have children for the same reasons. All around, the probability of surviving past 10 years old is very high.
Entitlement to having children is the base issue – that it is a good thing to do, even if it has an “instinctual” component. Populations were generally limited to available resources and now, we can manipulate those resources to always be abundant through scientific findings, namely food.
Next, as I see, any age human can have myriad pathologies but be kept alive through scientific medicine while the human is non-productive. This is seen as a virtuous component created by culture that has evolved and changed over time. It is a “because we can” mentality as opposed to “should we?”. When a person had x condition only thirty to fifty years ago, they would die and all would move on. Myriads of people are now maintained in the saddened health state as dependents of medicine and other humans to exist. This adds to the aggregate population still living.
These are not cruel statements – they are absolute matters of fact. Our minds have changed in decades to see maintenance of most lives as virtuous, even necessary, and it has changed our cultural ideals. I’ve seen many newborns that for the rest of their lives will have doctor appointments, tests, exams, procedures, pills, all of it for the rest of their lives. It will affect them severely, per bona fide research. And even if it is heritably genetics, the parents try for another child with the same result. While the sample size may be small, it says a lot about the cultural norms about having children at-large.
If one child can survive easily, adding another is not a big deal. Then the next, because they can survive. It is a section of behavioral economics that has reasons but no exact answers as the decision to have children and what number is so subjective while not being a mandate to one’s personal existence.
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