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Few people realize the incredible social/economic impact of the BCP!
People have tried for millennia to tame the human sex impulse, but nothing has been as effective as the pill. It's an invention that has changed what it means to be human, what it means to be a family, what it means to be a woman, and will eventually change the behavior of every person on the planet for the foreseeable future. It has destroyed religions that were thousands of years old and arrested and reversed the geometric population growth of our species.
When I read in the Old Testament about the worshipers of Baal and their practice of infant sacrifice, I can't help thinking that they did not do this just because they were evil, but also because they had too many mouths to feed, and no reliable method of birth control.
If it weren't for immigration, the United States would have been losing population since about 1973.
When the childbirth rate fell below replacement rate in many countries, commentators said this was temporary because Darwin. Since this trend has continued and even accelerated, I suggest that either their understanding of Darwin was wrong, or Darwin was wrong himself.
There are a lot of people in this world who do not contribute to the economy other than to suck up charity dollars (or whatever the local currency is) or commit crimes which are destructive to the economy. If they are gone, there won't be much effect on the economy.
The problem is going to be that the non-productive classes are reproducing at a generous rate ad the productive people are not reproducing at a replacement rate.
So when there are not enough goods to satisfy those who have nothing to do with producing them, I predict huge bloody wars to reduce the population.
Or Mother Nature is going to keep developing fatal illness until the herd is finally thinned to what the earth can support.
Ask yourself what "caused" world population to shrink in such a scenario.
In the US, the declining birth rate goes hand in hand with the decline in the standard of living. A child is a ticket to poverty. People can't afford them.
There's no sign that the birth rate will ever recover, so we may as well get used to it. We don't need all those workers anyway. Just automate and tax the robots to provide care for an ageing population.
-The world population will not peak in 2100. We will enter into a Malthusian catastrophe far before that point.
- The current economic paradigm requires infinite growth and infinite debt expansion, so obviously a declining population would negatively impact the global economy.
I'll buy that for sub-Saharan Africa, where the population is projected to triple. 9 million people a year already starve to death. Raise the price of food 10% and 10x as many starve. If global warming shoves us into worldwide crop failures, we could lose half a billion people a year to starvation. Global fisheries are already on the verge of collapse, and there goes 30% of world protein.
Grain production is highly variable, depending on weather. World reserves dropped to 57 days in 2006, which triggered a 22% spike in prices. The US hardly noticed, but in poor parts of the world it was a disaster. Thailand banned export of rice, and that 190 million metric tons of rice that didn't go to Africa meant a lot of people went hungry. The locust plague this year means a lot of countries will be importing food. Fortunately, there is a global oversupply.
Few people outside the agriculture industry have any idea how fragile world food supply is.
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