Quote:
Originally Posted by whswhs
I don't think that last part can be said to be really accurate. Up until the substantial economic hit of the pandemic, at least, Earth was experiencing a sustained worldwide decrease in absolute poverty and specifically in hunger: Not merely in proportion of the population experiencing either but in absolute numbers doing so, even as total population climbed. There's not much point in saying "A is the underlying cause of B" if B is not in fact present.
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In many places that is because the average age of the population is going up - i.e. more of it is in the productive part of their lives. In fact the average number of children per woman globally has dropped down to something pretty close to 2 (i.e. replacement) for new mothers - it's 2.4 even for all women, down from about 2.8 as recently as 20 years ago. The population is still increasing only because there were *fewer people* in the past, so the number of people in the older age cohorts is low for the numbers in the younger ones - that is only because the population was recently not in equilibrium.
Earth's population dynamics for the last century or so are definitely not the equilibrium case that ecological carrying capacity assumes. The debate is over whether that's a sign the carrying capacity increased, resulting an S curve step function, a temporary perturbation that will result in a post J curve crash, or something in between.