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Birth rate seems to converge to 1-2 children per couple in advanced economies anyway. Really we should be ensuring access to birth control and education in dev

Birth rate seems to converge to 1-2 children per couple in advanced economies anyway. Really we should be ensuring access to birth control and education in developing countries along with improving medical services to cut infant mortality (so that parents can be sure their young will reach old age and don't need to play it safe and have many young). We are getting there slowly, but we could do more.

barry-cotter 7y ago
> Birth rate seems to converge to 1-2 children per couple in advanced economies anyway. This is incoherent. You can’t converge on extinction. Any population that doesn’t even replace itself will die out rapidly. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1090513817302799#bb0180 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109051381... > The heritability of fertility makes world population stabilization unlikely in the foreseeable future > The forecasting of the future growth of world population is of critical importance to anticipate and address a wide range of global challenges. The United Nations produces forecasts of fertility and world population every two years. As part of these forecasts, they model fertility levels in post-demographic transition countries as tending toward a long-term mean, leading to forecasts of flat or declining population in these countries. We substitute this assumption of constant long-term fertility with a dynamic model, theoretically founded in evolutionary biology, with heritable fertility. Rather than stabilizing around a long-term level for post-demographic transition countries, fertility tends to increase as children from larger families represent a larger share of the population and partly share their parents' trait of having more offspring. Our results suggest that world population will grow larger in the future than currently anticipated.

barry-cotter 7y ago

> Birth rate seems to converge to 1-2 children per couple in advanced economies anyway. This is incoherent. You can’t converge on extinction. Any population that doesn’t even replace itself will die out rapidly. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1090513817302799#bb0180 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109051381... > The heritability of fertility makes world population stabilization unlikely in the foreseeable future > The forecasting of the future growth of world population is of critical importance to anticipate and address a wide range of global challenges. The United Nations produces forecasts of fertility and world population every two years. As part of these forecasts, they model fertility levels in post-demographic transition countries as tending toward a long-term mean, leading to forecasts of flat or declining population in these countries. We substitute this assumption of constant long-term fertility with a dynamic model, theoretically founded in evolutionary biology, with heritable fertility. Rather than stabilizing around a long-term level for post-demographic transition countries, fertility tends to increase as children from larger families represent a larger share of the population and partly share their parents' trait of having more offspring. Our results suggest that world population will grow larger in the future than currently anticipated.