Reply #9: The growth rate has gone down considerably over last 40 years. [View All]

[David__77]

This makes sense. People are becoming more affluent and the old peasant economy is being superseded in many parts of the world, reducing the desire for large families.

China will likely move to negative or zero growth at some point. Much of Europe is that way already, not accounting for migration flows. India and many developing countries aren't all that far behind China in modifying family structure and size.

The expansion of human population made a certain sense since life expectancy radically increased in the last 150 years or so. Even in the US, it was scarcely above 45 years' life expectancy a century ago. It wasn't so much that fertility rates were increasing, but that people weren't dying off as babies or young people so much. And that doesn't even account for the much higher natural miscarriage rate back then. It has taken some time to adjust. People have slowly adopted modern family planning practices. This trend will expand in the years and decades to come.