Million dollar blog post 2: Who wants babies anyway?
It’s been a while coming, but this is the second part of a series that is going to make me rich.
Last time I explained why populations grow. Now I’m going to look at what happens next.
When we left our story last time, we were all having ten kids who were having ten kids. What happens next might not surprise you: we start having fewer kids.
Yep. We suddenly realise that it’s not that awesome having so many kids around.
Some people say it goes a bit like this: the kids were great when you needed them to work the farm. But when everybody started moving into big cities they became a little less handy, although they could still contribute to family income by working at the factory. Then eventually they just became too expensive. Child labour was oh so last century and suddenly all those children are really expensive with all their food and education.
In reality it’s probably a little bit more complicated than that, but even if we’re not sure why it happened, it still happened: we started having a lot less children on average.
The important point here is that we took a while to figure out we wanted less children: life expectancy improved first (less babies dying) and sometime later fertility fell (less babies been born). In the time in between the population grew at a phenomenal rate.
So how come we’re still growing? Well, although some countries are towards the end of this process, others (particularly developing countries) are still part way through. They haven’t quite corrected for the fact that their children aren’t dying anymore. They’ll get there, but it takes quite some time.
If you want to read more about this process (by people who know what they’re talking about) look up “The Demographic Transition”.
November 1, 2010 at 9:59 am
Siiiiggghhhh… You’re taking me back to year 12 Geography Matt! I thought that the Majority World wasn’t following the same demographic pattern that the West did? For example, England, Industrial Revolution, decreasing infant mortality, people moving to the ‘burbs, etc… African nations? Introduced technologies, Western imposed ideas, utterly different cultural ideas to ones being introduced, medicines available but not affordable, continuing exponential growth, etc… Or something like that, it’s been a while…!
November 1, 2010 at 10:26 am
True, it’s a slightly different pattern. If anything it’s an accelerated version of the Western pattern. Most developing countries are already in the decreasing infant mortality bit… that’s why they’re growing so fast at the moment. Some countries are even further along, and fertility rates are starting to fall. Falling fertility is almost inevitable as people start to adjust to the fact that their children live.
November 4, 2010 at 10:51 am
Isn’t this also part of the story:
People were having lots of kids. Contraception was introduced. People now have less kids.
November 5, 2010 at 4:36 pm
Yes – part of the story. However, contraception has been introduced in many developing nations but fertility isn’t falling to anywhere near the levels in the developed world. People need to actually want less kids. Usually they want to have less kids once they realise they don’t all die.
November 9, 2011 at 2:15 pm
You don’t get it matt, developing countries aren’t the problem at all. It is the western world that consumes too much per capita. Comparitively we are the ones doing the most damage, even with lower fertility, smaller families blah blah blah. The problem is that the western world is in a state of denial about this and the only way modern humans know how to be happy is to buy something new and exciting to them – whether that be some new shoes or a new mobile phone. I think the only way anything will change is through understanding ourselves, i mean go tell someone they are an animal and i bet they will try to argue the fact. Most humans go through life never actually understanding what they are and how their life effects the world around.