Why the world population won’t exceed 11 billion | Hans Rosling | TGS.ORG

Hans Rosling rebuts this, especially in Factfulness.* If you look at population trends in countries worldwide, populations routinely level out only after improving underlying economic and health conditions. When infant mortality is high and children are an economic necessity, parents compensate by having many kids. When a country gets better healthcare and better economic opportunities, there's an initial generation of population explosion as more kids suddenly survive childhood, but then the population immediately plateaus and begins to recede. The epidemiological studies and population data is overwhelming that the simple model Malthus used fails to explain human behavior. * Also in some videos online: 1. [link] 2. [this video] But to put in a closing plug for Factfulness, it's one of the best simple and accessible primers how to avoid major cognitive biases, and also teaches a lot about the current state of the world.

>as a result of that, the world's population has been growing and growing At first yes, but not recently, now the opposite is true, if anything. We haven't had exponential growth since the 60s and are currently headed towards a steady state population because of improved standards of living. Turns out health and properity leads to smaller families. We do still have significant growth, but that is largely because we're filling out the older demographics in many countries, the birth rate is largely under control already, and once the current generations spread through we'll be in a stead state (around 11 billion). In fact, there's no way to _stop_ this growth now, short of killing or sterilising people, since the birthrate is already under control, we're just waiting for the last exponential generations to get old. see [this video] Long term, we probably should encourage (slightly) sub-2 children per family to let the total population shrink, but that will take a long time (unless something disasterous happens)