Re: The joy of actual numbers, was Democracy

On Sun, 3 Nov 2024, Peter Flass wrote:

John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:

According to Charlie Gibbs  <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid>:

On 2024-10-27, John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:

My back-of-the-envelope calculation tells me that if we continue
to double our population every 40 years, ...

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You might want to get some numbers for your envelope more recent than the 1950s.
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Here's a good place to start:
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https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/900

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Thanks for the link.  Let's see how hard the government works
(e.g. baby bonuses) to get that extra 0.5 child per household.

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I have no idea what you mean by "the government" when talking about
world population, but national governments including China, Japan, and
many European countries have tried to get fertility rates back up.
They have all been complete failures.
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I’m just wondering how much of the decline is individual choice and how
much is due to all the chemicals we keep pumping into the environment.

Decreasing fertility is a global phenomenon, so I think individual choice is a smaller component. I'm sure it is bigger in the west though, than in the rest of the world. But don't ask me to put figures on it.
Fascinating problem though!
But eventually, the ones who enjoy having offspring will be selected for, naturally, and the problem will rectify itself.