DON'T PANIC — Hans Rosling showing the facts about population

This video seems relevant: [VIDEO] According to Hans Rosling we've reached "peak child", meaning we're almost at 2 children per woman globally. This means population will continue to grow for a few years as globally there are more children than adults but will stabilize after that around the ~11 billion mark. And as long as we stay at that "peak child" number we won't go any further. I really recommend his videos if you haven't seen them.

Until the modern era, the global birth rate was fairly constant at about six per woman. The population growth we've experienced over the last century is mostly to do with child survival. Before 1900, the child mortality rate in India was over 50%. If you need children to care for you in old age and expect most of your children to die, you're likely to have a lot of them. When child survival improved, attitudes changed. Parents no longer want three or four children to work on the family farm, they want one or two children to become doctors or engineers. Economic development and the availability of reliable contraception have made that aspiration practical. If you're interested in the topic, I can highly recommend this lecture by the late Hans Rosling: [VIDEO]

Because there is no world overpopulation. People talk about overpopulation since ancient times. [LINK] Currently standard of living are growing almost all over the world and human population is predicted to pick and stabilize at around 11 billion. I really recommend "DON'T PANIC — Hans Rosling showing the facts about population" [VIDEO] What's also interesting in his video is the fact that people tend to be very misinformed about state of the world affairs. E.g. when asked questions about certain statistics, they do worse than random. And the better educated you are the more misinformed you may be.

The issue here is mostly with the countries in extreme poverty. Countries with average fertility rate of 3 and higher. Women in countries with the highest fertility index often do not control when they get pregnant. Having 6 and more children is rarely effect of conscious family planning. It's effect of lack of education, lack of access to contraception, forced sex in marriage etc. Sometimes having many children is an insurance policy in case some children will die before they reach productive age. We really should be addressing this type of issues underlying uncontrolled population growth. People should be able to choose when they want to have children, how many children they want, they should be educated on how to provide for their children, and certainly people should not be afraid that some part of their offspring will die. It has nothing to do with penalizing having children like they did in China. I really recommend, "DON'T PANIC — Hans Rosling showing the facts about population". He shows how family planning looks like in practice in countries like Bangladesh, so that westerners can imagine what are we talking about: [VIDEO] Dealing with global warming is going bad and we should panic about that, but humanity is making great progress on controlling population growth. There is really no issue with you having 3 children. Western population will be declining anyway as fertility rate in western countries is mostly below 2. Just please, support political, systematical chang

In that case don't worry: [VIDEO] Also consider that the carrying capacity of the world isn't fixed, but depends on how good our technology is (with a potential theoretical upper limit). Well tech is improved by people working on and inventing better technology, right? So you get better technology with more people - and with that you can have more people working on better technology. The biggest mistake, and the one all Malthusians made, is to forget that humans are, on average, net produces not net consumers.

He has a lot of good videos out there but this is the one specifically covering Africa / population predictions and the misconceptions / dated knowledge. [VIDEO]

There's a good presentation by Hans Rosling about why population will peak at 11B (stick with until 26m): * [VIDEO] Further on he explains why we may not have to worry about resource use given growing prosperity: * [VIDEO]

You should check out Hans Rosling's lectures [1]. Statistics points towards the fact that as people become more wealthy, they have less children. It should stagnate around 11 million people by most models. [1] [VIDEO]