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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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.
Because people who want tp have children still have children, and pur massive efforts to reduce Infant Mortality over the generations mean that people can have a *lot* of children, and expect almost all of them to survive to adulthood.
Humanity hasn’t increased insanely in the last few centuries, it’s increased insanely in the last CENTURY, from 1.6 Billion in 1900 to the current 7.7 Billion.
Simply put: Humans are no longer dying as we used to. Preventing births would imply that human population growth would slow, not increase. The element that caused growths to naturally slow was the fact that life on earth is normally very brutal and humans in particular are not well adapted to survival, especially early on in life. The primary cause of populaiton growth is in fact NOT food (that’s actually a result) but medicine.
From birth we are stunningly likely to not only kill ourselves during the process but kill our mothers (historically 20% of women would die at some point from childbirth alone)The medical practices developed in the mid 1800s started a progression that when combined with succesful germ theory massivey increased the survival rate of new borns and young children.
Further, the development of the antiobiotic in the early 20th century combined with the viral vaccine in the mid 20th century saw yet further normal causes of deaths eliminated.
In short, humans normally die at very high rates when you remove our advanced technology and medicine, and that’s not even taking into account events like war/famine/crime.
Not requested but added: People don’t need to worry too much about population growth. The increased rate of population has already been observed to be stabalizing as the initial generations of “lots of children” generations are now dying off and the current populations have stunningly (destructively so) low birthrates. It needs to be remembered that for a population to remain stable, every woman needs to have at least TWO children survive to have children of their own, which means when you include the normal deaths that occur before that happens, the actual birthrate needs to be HIGHER. The current birthrate of the USA alone is 1.64 children, which means that the population of the USA at the moment is technically in a self-destructive phase…yet more evidence for the fact that the population “Crisis” many golbalists have touted for decades is already stabalizing.
It’s also how population works.
Let’s assume that on average, ppl have 2 kids.
So if there is only 1 couple, they have 2 kids so population grows by 2
Now let’s assume there are 2 couples, they each have 2 kids- so now population grows by 4. So the next generation, it will Keep growing exponentially
Less children are dying than they used to, and more people are breeding for longer. You’ll have people that breed 6-10 kids well into their 40s and 50s now. This happens in all countries. Within the last century it has been incentivized to have multiple children, tax credits, free housing, free food, free Healthcare programs (if you’re unaware, look it up). Unfortunately birth control still has too many barriers. It needs to be over the counter and accessible everywhere.
Vaccines/antibiotics/modern medicine, sanitation, plentiful food.
For a huge proportion of human history people were dying of illness, infection, treatable injuries, malnutrition or starvation at a rate orders of magnitude higher than the present and recent past.
Food supply is and always will be the driving factor for population size. Abundant food means more things can be alive.
for most of history human population was kept in balance with it’s environment by the four horsemen; famine, plague, war and death.
In recent history food production has increased due to the green revolution.
Disease has decreased due to antibiotics, vaccines and water treatment.
and the post WW-II era has been remarkably peaceful.
Don’t worry, once the resources start running short we’ll go back to the old ways. The past 100 years was a short term anomaly.
Science.
Science as it relates to agriculture, medicine, and engeneering to be specific.
We are a lot better at staying alive than we used to be.
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