The science is already there, it’s just that people are too stubborn to comprehend it. We prefer our biases to the evidence. The evidence is that there are three naturally occurring population types in regards to demographics and a fourth new / artificial one.
- Pre-industrial agrarian societies. High fertility rates, high death rates, low population growth rates.
- Transitional societies. Recently introduced industry, sanitation and education. High fertility rates (though falling), much reduced death rates, high population growth rate.
- Post transitional industrial / urbanized societies. Low fertility rates, low death rates, low to no population growth rates.
The above three are widely recognized demographic stages that have been observed well BEFORE the advent of the pill or latex. That’s right, wealthy urbanites have had small families right from the beginning of the industrial revolution. Seems to be the nature of the beast.
Population alarmists typically look at a single snapshot of current fertility trends and assume those trends are permanent, then panic after projecting out the numbers a century or two. But history already shows that it doesn’t work that way. The rapid global population growth of the last century is the direct result of most of Earth being in demographic stage 2 simultaneously. Most nations are already nearing the end of that stage and ALL first world nations are in stage 3 or later (more on that in a minute).
The reason this occurs is that urban living innately is harder on big families than agricultural living was. Humans, being rational creatures, tend to react to those circumstances by having smaller families in urbanized conditions. Contrary to Sandra Fluke propaganda, people have been able to prevent pregnancy long before free OR paid contraception came along. Humans are mammals and make symptoms of fertility. Catholics like to imagine we invented NFP recently, but it’s really just a scientific veneer on old fashioned ag husbandry.
What artificial contraception has done is to disconnect sex psychologically from the idea of children in ways that is literally killing human civilization. When you had to discipline your sexual urges to avoid pregnancy, the sex drive remained coupled to procreation and stage 3 urban replacement fertility resulted. But every single nation on earth that has reached stage 3 and then adopted legal, accessible and respectable contraception now has a fertility rate
dramatically below replacement rate. Worse, the ‘gospel’ of contraception is being aggressively pushed in the stage 2 nations such that many of them have skipped stage 3 altogether and gone directly to this anti-human stage 4. No country that has reached this “stage 4” has EVER returned back to a stable, years long native replacement fertility rate.
We’ve nothing to fear from “over-population.” The long term demographic trends today point more towards perpetual population decline. To be sure, we still have a few more years of increases riding the last of the stage 2 waves. But from there, it’s nothing but downhill unless we dramatically reform our understanding of what human sexuality is and what it is for.
Unless there is a major culture change, Earth will never reach 10 billion people. We’ll peak somewhere around 9B and decline from there until / unless there is a major civilizational change. Some people relish the idea of fewer humans, but they aren’t thinking it through. Subreplacement fertility means your taxes will be increased to pay for more elderly dependents, your fuel taxes will be increased so that fewer users must pay for the same number of road miles, real estate values will decline as supply exceeds demand and fewer consumers reduce economic demand across the spectrum. Sounds great, huh? Higher taxes, lower pay, deflation. “Not with a bang, but a whimper.”
P.S. The example of the “overpopulated” UK is absurd. The UK was the dominant global power in the memory of some still alive today. As such, the entire nation has some characteristics of a city. You can’t prove that Los Angeles is “overpopulated” because it can’t grow enough of it’s own food inside city limits. That’s just the nature of a city. The UK is merely still enjoying the after-effects of being an imperial power with a global reach. But you haven’t had native population increases in years because you’re terminally in stage 4. The only upward pressure is via immigration. That only lasts as long as there are stage 2 nations to provide immigrants.
Exactly this.
