Population increases when famine hits or when hard times occur.
Population stabilizes to 2 or even drops below that even when there is proper education well-being and life expectancy compared to above mentioned.
Why is this Counter-intuitive?
Where did the population stabilize to 2??
Historically populations tend to balance themselves as people will choose to have fewer children when times are hard. Want more babies? Make life better for parents and children. It’s that simple.
CCP be like: “Stop having more than 1 child”
Also CCP in 2015: “Pweeese have more babies, also abortion is now more restricted even though we used to send police to enforce abortions against the mother’s will, but forget about that. There was never One Child Policy in
Ba Sing SePRC.”Does population increase when famine hits? As I understand it the main brakes on population in human history have been famine and disease. The level of population that a society can support is usually based on its agriculture resources and technology. However, historically, the population would tend towards the highest level supportable, and then years with poor food producing conditions would cause famine and the population would contract.
Over the last century or so, the cycle has changed. Now societies with a food surplus don’t generally see constant population growth because of two things - food production is no longer dependant on how many humans can you put to work in the fields, so there’s less need for more kids to make a family’s work easier (in fact, each modern child costs more effort and expense than they produce); and we have birth control and education, which allow people to make more intentional decisions about when and if they have children.
Combining a lack of incentive with the capacity to choose means that many societies have broken the population growth and contraction (ie baby boom followed by famine) cycle. This leads to different problems such as aging populations, but that’s another discussion.
