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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In short: we are very good at not dying when we are kids.
And for the rest of the comments saying healthcare and specifying stuff like antibiotics. It’s not why we live longer. Or, well it contributes. But public health is a much larger factor. You want to know the biggest contribution to prolonged health? Penicillin? Operations? Vaccines? Nope. Sanitation.
Also look up the epidemiological transition if you are interested in how we live longer, why, and how we transition from communicable diseases to non-communicable diseases.
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.
Antibiotics and medical advancement.
It was common for families to have 6+ children because half of them died. Being diabetic is no longer a death sentence, etc.
Population growth is probably due more to the fact we’re living longer the world over. No idea on the stats but I believe birth rates are falling in first and third world countries (??).
But at the same time life expectancy has increased dramatically across the world, so where the average life expectancy in 1900s was say 50 (again pulling numbers out of my arse, just trying to show an ELI5 example), now it’s ~70-80 — which means populations will increase even if birth rates are falling.
The biggest limiting factor to human population is the availability of food. People have gotten much better at growing and distributing food in the past few centuries. This happened through the combined effect of a lot of smaller agricultural improvements. Things like new types of crop rotation, new ways of organizing fields, better sowing and harvesting equipment, fertilizers, canals and railroads to move food around, all have a cumulative effect.
These innovations come from a lot of places, but really coalesce in Britain starting in the 1600s. Britain has a population boom starting in the 1600s. The huge increase in food and population in Britain is part of why the industrial revolution begins there. More food, more people, less people involved in making food, more time to make other stuff. From Britain, the combination of techniques spreads and continue to be improved upon. Up until today where you have things like the Green Revolution, GMO crops, fully automated tractors, etc.
See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Agricultural_Revolution
Birth control being invented and having access to it are 2 different things. Even the ability to afford it is a barrier to use. Some countries simply have none available, or having a large family is necessary to help even parents retire. Not all countries have a social safety net.
As others have said, even if it was available, a couple having 3-4 kids increases the population. Living longer increases the population if more babies are being born than seniors dieing.
Vaccines and public sanitation. Vaccines and environmental laws. Vaccines and better nutrition. Vaccines and antibiotics. Vaccines and chemical fertilizers. Vaccines and hypertension drugs. Vaccines and helmets.
See a pattern here? When is the last time you were out in public and you saw someone in leg braces from childhood polio? I think there are one or two iron lungs left in the USA.
Before the widespread use of vaccines, a lot of kids died of childhood illnesses. Without smallpox and the various diseased treated by penicillin culling our young, more young people made it to adulthood.
Hormonal birth control is about 60 years old, which means that a significant portion of the humans alive today were born in its absence. Prior to that, there were some technological advances in condoms (mostly to make them cheaper rather than more effective), but the idea of creating a physical barrier goes back millennia. So we have really only had two or three generations in what you might call a “modern” birth control regime.
And the “we” bit here is important because I’m assuming you (like me) live in the developed world where access to hormonal birth control actually IS widespread. In those areas, population growth has mostly leveled off like you’d expect it to when women can control their fertility. In many places, like Italy and Japan, populations are declining. In even more places, like Germany and Spain, populations are only stable due to immigration.
The main engines of population growth for the past century have been in places where hormonal birth control is not widely available. There are a mind-boggling number of people living in India and China, and they have had a mind-boggling number of children over the past century. The demographic transition is coming for them too, but it will take time. China jumpstarted it with their one-child policy and is already facing the prospect of declining population despite a massive population where hormonal birth control is still not widely available or accepted.
youre assuming that most people use any birth control when its actually the other way around due to access, affordability, religious beliefs, and even laws in some countries. additionally, people who wouldnt be able to reproduce otherwise can now do so via IVF or using surrogacy. plus living longer with all the medical advancements (for the most part).
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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