[betwixthewires]

People don't just have kids en masse without a reason. People historically had lots of kids for 2 reasons: a lot of them died before reaching reproductive age, and they needed more hands to produce food because most people lived in a subsistence agriculture environment.

The population boom over the last 100 years is not due to people reproducing too much, it is due to a decrease in child mortality, that and development from agricultural to industrial economies meant a cultural lag time in reducing the number of kids a woman has.

Once you have an industrial economy, the pressure then becomes to have less kids. You don't need to be told in a classroom to do that, it happens naturally. If you need proof, these education programs didn't exist in the west during development into industrial economies and yet the fertility rate decreased simply due to economic pressures.

A fertility rate of 2.3 (the .3 accounting for child death and people who don't ever have kids) is replacement rate. At that rate population does not increase.

Long story short, at least in cities (where the water shortage we are talking about is happening) you won't see a doubling of the population due to sustained fertility. So the shortages you see of water and other resources can be entirely attributed to inefficient resource allocation, and once capacity is increased to match population you won't have to worry about it again and again.

[vishnugupta]

> A fertility rate of 2.3 (the .3 accounting for child death and people who don't ever have kids) is replacement rate.

This is a good point which often gets overlooked in the heated debate of population explosion.

Coincidentally just a year or two ago Indian growth rate reached replacement levels[1]. As per the latest data (not sure if it's been reviewed/confirmed) it's now slightly below the replacement levels.

Also, if you notice, the southern states's growth rate is well below that of replacement level.

[1] https://niti.gov.in/content/total-fertility-rate-tfr-birth-w...

[lotsofpulp]

I would say the debate is more accurately about distributing resources to an "exploding" amount of people. Bringing up the entire population of India (just as an example, could be any country) to the living standards that are commonly discussed (such as potable water, sufficient nutrition, healthcare, etc) could very well be practically impossible.

[betwixthewires]

Yep, when I make the argument that "the problem is resource allocation, not overpopulation" I don't mean to imply that resource availability can be instantaneously ramped up locally with an influx in population, there is obviously latency there, and there will be a lag in standard of living during a sharp population increase. But this isn't a permanent state due to there being too many people.

I don't think it is impossible to bring the projected population of India up to decent living standards, I think this is highly unlikely, but my point doesn't account for that, so it could very well be.

[Chris2048]

> You don't need to be told in a classroom to do that, it happens naturally

That's just a theory, and if you're wrong, then what? A description of what you think will happen needs better evidence. At least one other factor is religious/cultural inertia encouraging people to have lots of children, and that is somewhat characteristic/unique for each given culture s.t. you can't really generalise it too much.

There was a similar theory about non-democracies being unstable (Democratic peace theory, wrt greater public wealth), and how free trade liberates nations. How did that turn out for Chinese superpower?

China is an emerging superpower, and economic powerhouse, and anti-democratic to the extend of suppressing democracy in HK. It also does lot of trade that never seems to encourage an increase in civil liberties.

Now, maybe the theory was all an illusion caused by the domination and coercive power, of existing democratic nations.

[betwixthewires]

You have a good point. I'd say educating women (and people in general) is a good idea generally speaking, and so could potentially help in this regard if what I said is wrong, so it doesn't hurt. But I do believe that people who have resources to support 3 people don't deliberately have 10 kids, that's the economic pressure that I'm relying on, I'd say accidental births would be more of a factor here than inertia due to cultural norm. Contraceptive technology IMO is more important.