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Comment by tenant | Hacker News Reader

So, my country which feels big to me couldn't do it. This reinforces my belief that there are way too many of our species on this planet. Given that 2.1 or so is the replacement rate, a "hard" limit of two child per woman would be decent compromise as this would equate to somewhere around 1.7 taking into account women who don't want to /can't have children. In one generation, if there were no unintended consequences this would drop the population by 15%.

Sometime in the 2100s it would be half what it is today and my country could easily fit everyone!

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Investing in education, and women's education in particular, is one of the most effective ways of bringing down birth rates over time. It obviously has all sorts of other advantages too, which I don't need to go into here.

You just need to glance at China's current demographics to see that hard limits on number of children is not a good idea, both societally (in terms of treatment of women and prospects, for want of a better word, for large numbers of single men) and economically (such as the burden of numbers of children and pensioners per working age adult).

The Economist did a brief piece on Africa's demographics recently. It's an interesting read.

https://www.economist.com/special-report/2020/03/26/africas-...

Most of the most-developed countries in the world are reproducing below the replacement rate already, populations only growing because of immigration.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...

I was thinking globally since the discussion was about the global population.

There seems to be a generational lag between infant mortality (or mortality before reproduction) and fertility rate.

Many places still have very high mortality-before-reproduction rates and correspondingly high birthrates, or at least generational recent ones.

It seems, simply, that overpopulation is a problem which solves itself. High standard of living seems to come with high costs and emphasis on investing in children far more combined with delaying children until proper resources can be had. The result? Fewer children.

The doom and gloom about overpopulation was overblown and doesn't look to be a problem. We have enough food production capability (especially with new lands to open up with global warming), hunger comes from dysfunctional economies, not lack of food.

It doesn't make much sense to think about global population as a whole when there is such variability. You can't compare Manhattan to sub-Saharan Africa at all, they are totally different worlds (or perhaps a hundred or two years apart developmentally).

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