[masklinn]

> Once you get rid of the main causes of child mortality, you have to either stop having so many kids, or dramatically increase food production. Otherwise curing Malaria can result later in all the problems that accompany a lack of resources: bigger famines, increased civil strife and warfare.

Much as what happened in Europe, this tends to self-regulate over a few generations: high natality is a requirement in high-death and low-income situations, where you need many children to have some survive (and help you in old age), and children are hands that can work and provide wealth.

As mortality decreases you need less children as they'll pretty much all survive, and as wealth increases you want less children because raising them to your society's standards gets more expensive and there's a much bigger investment in each child.

Of course there will be 2-3 generations with high natality and low mortality, and an explosion of younger generations (likely leading to a few revolutions). But there's little you can do about that in the short term.

[hessenwolf]

Yes - see Germany, Italy, Singapore and Japan for high life expectancy and low birth rate. Interestingly, children also become less affordable, as opposed to just less financially necessary.

[masklinn]

Yep, noted that at the end of the second paragraph (might not have been clear enough)

[hessenwolf]

Oh, no, you were really clear. I just did not read that paragraph. Oops...