Population Growth

Some places in the world will see huge population increases, while others will see dramatic population drops.

It is no surprise that industrialized nations decrease in population. As these things go, individual motivation is much more powerful than government interventions. Sex ed and free birth control doesn't much help when the people want to have 10 children.

In a third-world nation, people are still subsistance farming. In the absence of labor-saving technology and distribution, each child becomes an economic plus. The more kids, the more food. In urban areas, where child labor is not only allowed, but usually necessary to survival, more children means more money. There may be a "break even" point on the number of children you need to have in order to survive. This would make an interesting study.

In a first-world nation like ours, children are an economic problem. Those of us who do have children, do so for non-economic reasons -- out of love, desire for a family, pressure from extended relatives, accidents, or genetic immortality. We don't bear children to make more money. There is an additional outpouring of money for each new child born, and for that reason (and many others), Americans choose to have fewer children. As do the Japanese, Swedish, Germans, Russians, and other industrialized nations.

Overpopulation is allowed to thrive due to the benefits spilling into third-world countries from the first-world. Infant mortality and death in general is reduced by antibiotics and other modern medicine. But without the first-world motivations to match the technology, more and more children will be born.

This is setting those places up for major problems. Eventually, population mass will reach a critical point -- when there is no longer enough land for subsistance farming, which will lead to worsening food shortages in the urban areas.

The only resoltuion is to provide industrialization. And as long as that industrialization is under the control of militant dicators, the population will continue to be exploited, and the individual people will never receive the wealth that will motivate them to stop having children. What they need, instead, is the removal of despots and tyranists, in favor of constitutional rights and free elections. Let the people make themselves wealthy, through their own adult ingenuity, and the population growth will settle. Child labor will cease.