(December 14, 2014 at 8:31 pm)Tartarus Sauce Wrote:(December 14, 2014 at 7:39 pm)Cthulhu Dreaming Wrote: Well, yeah - population grows when the birth rate > death rate. That's kind of tautological.
Number of offspring isn't directly a factor, not as much as you might think. Every couple could have 15 kids, and if only three reached reproductive age, your population growth would be slower than if every couple had four that all reached reproductive age. All else being equal, of course.
It seems to me that mortality is the more important factor, all else being equal.
Except that doesn't explain the explosive population growth in countries like Niger, which have huge offspring rates yet high mortality rates as well.
Clearly, either the fertility rates are far in excess of mortality, or there is some external factor (such as immigration). I was thinking of global rates that aren't constrained by political boundaries, and thus are not subject to external influences such as immigration.
