(December 16, 2014 at 5:53 pm)lifesagift Wrote:(December 16, 2014 at 5:47 pm)Chuck Wrote: As society developed from subsistence to leisured affluence, people put off having children and death rate begins to approach now diminished birth rate, so population levels off.
If wealth continues to spread around the world (on the whole there are lot more people in the world reaching leisured affluence each year than dropping back to subsistence poverty) eventually diminished birth rate will spread to all continents and human population as a whole will level off.
the poor will continue as is, and produce children with no food and disease, so I accept they will remain constant, albeit with slightly increased numbers due to medicines reaching more regions.
But religious based, developing countries will continue to have as many sons as they can, and increase dramatically. They already make up half the population, so they will create health and food problems surely, as well as much conflict and wars?
The experience seems to be so long as the country is actually "developing", it will eventually reach the point in material development where benefits of the newly acquired realities of a leisured existence with spare spending power would overcome the religious stricture to squander the leisure and spending power on additional unwanted and highly troublesome babies, and birthrate would drop.
The religious trumpets the power of the spiritual. But the power of the spiritual is impotent before the power of the material every time the power of the spiritual had been so bold and foolhardy as to test itself against the power of the material.
