Interesting article on global population page

[SarahChzBurg]

Interesting Article

I wonder if there's any correlation about the influx of grains into the human diet and the decrease in fertility...it can't all be about education!

[magicmerl]

Perhaps you're not educated enough to understand ...

[Bosnic]

Diet can explain things like lowered testosterone levels, but I'm not sure it is as big an impact on birth (fertility) rates as:

- Low infant mortality rates.
- Women having more rights.
- Widespread access to birth control.
- Abortion.

And most importantly:

- No longer needing a family of 5, so that they can help the father work on the farm. Now, children aren't a financial asset, they are a financial burden.

[SarahChzBurg]

Wow...not the response I expected.

[sbhikes]

Interesting article. But having fewer people is not that meaningful if they are all going to be consuming resources at the rate of Americans. Although it's extremely meaningful when you consider various social programs that depend upon a large base of young people supporting a small amount of old people.

[Uncephalized]

The article was interesting, but the doom-and-gloom idea that the human race would ever go extinct through natural birthrate decline is nonsense. A world with only a few hundred million people in it would be an entirely different place than one with 7 billion. We have no idea what incentives and environmental pressures people in that world would experience. There's no reason to suppose that the population would just keep dwindling until we died out.

I, for one, welcome a world of declining human population. Less ecosystem pressure and more available resources for everyone. We'd need a concurrent shift in the way we think about how the economy works (since the workforce would be shrinking and serving an aging population), but as long as the decline was relatively slow I think it would be well within the capabilities of a technological society to handle, given that per-worker productivity is so high today. It's certainly better than the continued-growth scenario with world population hitting 9-12 billion people in the next century.

[Rojo]

"Over"population has been a bogeyman since Malthus.

[SarahW]

Wow...not the response I expected.

No worries - we had a population/fertility/something discussion a few times the past couple of months. It sometimes went....weird.

[peril]

Diet can certainly explain low conception and high miscarriage rates. Weston Price covers these in Nutrition and Physical Degeneration

[Bosnic]

Wow...not the response I expected.

No worries - we had a population/fertility/something discussion a few times the past couple of months. It sometimes went....weird.

I don't understand what was so wrong with my post. I wasn't trying to convince anyone of anything; in fact I would love to have children some day.

My explanations for why birth rates are falling are generally accepted by demographers.