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Comment by sintaxi | Hacker News Reader

Yet fertility rate in South Sudan is a staggering 4.9 vs 1.8 in USA.

You say "yet" but "and" would be more appropriate. The fertility rate is a symptom of, among other things, high child mortality and low access to birth control.

and religion. We need to face the fact that religion, often religion exported by the west, is killing people in these countries. Almost all missionary religions forbid birth control.

Protestant Christianity typically doesn't forbid birth control, as far as I know.

Evangelical protestant Christianity does. And the other forms of protestant Christianity rarely travel to Africa and other third world nations on mission trips.

As others pointed out, population growth is highest when people are poor. Complex issue, but something where you can wait to have kids and have just one or two if you know that the kids will survive and thrive. A life that seems not only temporarily unstable but has no possibility of stability is one where people have lots of kids to hedge their bets that some will survive and be okay — plus the lack of health care, contraception, education (esp. women's education and career prospects)…

http://www.gapminder.org/ for best perspectives on all this

4.9 is not that high by historic standards. Not everyone lives long enough to have kids.

The second half of this may be BS but the difference in Africa from 1950-2010 is staggering. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate#/media/...

PS: For comparison the baby boomers are from US fertility rates over 3.5 in the late 1950's. http://www.prb.org/publications/datasheets/2012/world-popula...

I doubt anyone is raising children in NYC on beans and casava or rice.

Don't knock it, beans and rice is pretty tasty. I don't think many people in NYC eat quality food. If you actually look at the ingredients list for many of the expensive prepared foods, you'll find that they may well be worse and have cheaper ingredients than beans and rice.

I kinda thought the same thing, until I moved there. Lived next to a family of (at least) 6 living in an extremely cramped one-bedroom apt in central Harlem. Thousands of poor people living blocks away from thousands of wealthy people.

What GP is trying to say: It's financially taxing to have 4+ children compared to 2 -- regardless of what type of food you have at your disposal.

Except in that context you don't just feed children they also work with you at a young age so... There's also an economic advantage to having children

Why would you even pretend you know how millions of people live?

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