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A comment on The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion.

Re:The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion by eli_gottlieb on Monday June 01, 2015 @01:31PM (#9640511)
Basically, it turns out that your population explodes when you're very poor, but then stabilizes and even shrinks as your society gets richer and richer. We have a population paradox: the highest-impact lifestyles are lived in countries with falling populations, while the major population growth takes place where the resources don't exist to disincentivize it.
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Re:The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion by panglott on Monday June 01, 2015 @02:35PM (#9641042)
I think "very poor" is a little inaccurate. Hunter-gatherers are "very poor", but don't have a population explosion problem. The societies that have population explosion are traditionally agricultural economies with restrictive gender norms that have not fully industrialized.

Basically, it's all about the returns to education. When women have reproductive choice, and when the returns to higher levels of education increase, then parents have fewer children but invest more resources into raising them.

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Re:The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion by eli_gottlieb on Monday June 01, 2015 @02:43PM (#9641118)
You're right, actually: women's education is a more proven intervention for reducing population growth than the increase of per-capita wealth.
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Re:The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion by dragonwriter on Monday June 01, 2015 @01:36PM (#9640567)
> Basically, it turns out that your population explodes when you're very poor, but then stabilizes and even shrinks as your society gets richer and richer.

IIRC, "strong social support network" is more accurate than "richer" as to the factor that reduces natural growth rate.

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Re:The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion by ams6110 on Monday June 01, 2015 @02:04PM (#9640791)
A strong social support network is impossible without a rich society.
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Re:The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion by dragonwriter on Monday June 01, 2015 @02:06PM (#9640803)
Neither of these is a binary category; countries can be richer than other countries but have a weaker social support system (the US, compared to many other developed countries, is a good example -- it also, has a higher natural population growth rate than many of those poorer-but-with-stronger-social-support countries.)
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