Quote:
Originally Posted by Freak80
Prediction: western civilization is heading for disaster because birth rates in western societies are heavily dependent on religion.
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The accuracy of the statement is 0 on a scale of 0-100 with 100 being the highest degree of accuracy.
Birth rates in all societies are dependent on Affluence, and Affluence alone, and no other factor.
Affluence is a combination of overall economic development, Standard of Living, basic freedoms and a few other things, but religion is not one of them.
When you're in a 0 Level Agrarian Economy based on subsistence agriculture and your Standard of Living is on a par with 1640's Colonial America, you need a lot of children.
You cannot spend 60-80/hours a week tending your fields, and herding your animals, and tending your home, and getting water, and traveling to other villages to trade your goods and such.
Seeing how you cannot pay anyone to work for you, you have children.
Children are labor; that's what they're for.
Your oldest child tends the fields with you, and if you need to travel, no problem. Another child tends your herds, while another child tends the shack you call home and keeps the fires burning.
Actually, that child is making charcoal. Charcoal is more efficient than wood or sod, so your wood fuel supply lasts longer.
Your wife and younger children are spending 2-8 hours a day to get water so you can cook and clean and drink.
Children are also your social security, in the event you can no longer work.
That's pretty much 80% of Africa. It's also a large chunk of Central and South America.
Yeah, the White people, you know, the European Mexicans and Brasilians and Argentinians and such are all college educated and have jobs, but the tribal people, you know, the "Native Americans" don't.
And it's the Middle East and Central Asia, and eastern Russia and a large part of Southeast Asia.
Electricity is a game-changer. So is running water. About 3 Billion people have neither.
Electricity brings mechanization, and that means you need only spend 10-20 hours a week farming, instead of 60-80.
It also provides other job opportunities so you don't have to farm for an income. At first, any warm body will do, but later it requires high school education, and then high school education plus vocational or technical training, and then college education and then advanced college degrees.
All those things combine to delay both marriage and child-birth.
For one, you have freedoms you never had and that is the freedom to pursue professional, career, social, financial and personal goals, and the pursuit of those goals often interferes with marriage and child-birth.
If you're worried about the world population, don't be, because the instant those 3 Billion people get electricity and running water, their birth rates will instantly start declining.
China and Russia are attempting to develop Africa, but the US created AFRICOM (the Africa Command) to thwart the development of those States and destabilize their economies to keep them from advancing.
I guess we'll see how it all turns out, but hopefully the Africans win.
Anyway, your global population should peak around 16 Billion to 17 Billion then decline slightly then remain unchanged.
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