It’s pretty apparent that the world’s in a very sorry state, we have warring, famine, disease, lack of resources, pollution and violations of human rights almost everywhere. But what if I told you that it can all be solved? It’s pretty obvious how, the world is simply over capacity to hold the amount of people that exist on it. Fighting occurs over land and resources, famine and disease follow from poor conditions, pollution and violation of human rights follow this in turn to try and fix the issue with short-term patches, but overall the issue isn’t solved. So you need to start with overpopulation.
Common misconception is just what overpopulation is, many people believe that all populations everywhere across the world are growing massively when this simply isn’t the case. If you consider that for every woman and man in a country, two children need to be produced to keep it stable, then you can also conclude than more than two children will make a country’s population fall, and, vice-versa, less than two children will make it fall.
So we need to lower population, but we can’t just kill people left and right, and we can’t impose limitations on how many children a couple can have. So what is the solution? It’s simple: Education.
Just take a look at these countries with the highest populations in the world:
- China – Population: 1.36 Billion (19% of the world’s total) (1.55 Children born/woman)
- India – Population: 1.26 Billion (17.5% of the world’s total) (2.51 Children born/woman)
- US – Population: 0.31 Billion (4.4% of the world’s total) (2.01 Children born/woman)
- Indonesia – Population: 0.25 Billion (3.5% of the world’s total) (2.18 Children born/woman)
- Brazil – Population: 0.2 Billion (2.8% of the world’s total) (1.79 Children born/woman)
- Pakistan – Population: 0.18 Billion (2.6% of the world’s total) (2.86 Children born/woman)
- Nigeria – Population: 0.17 Billion (2.4% of the world’s total) (5.25 Children born/woman)
- Bangladesh – Population: 0.15 Billion (2.1% of the world’s total) (2.45 Children born/woman)
- Russia – Population: 0.14 Billion (2% of the world’s total) (1.61 Children born/woman)
- Japan – Population: 0.12 Billion (1.7% of the world’s total) (1.4 Children born/woman)
Although China, the US, Brazil, Russia and Japan have some of the highest populations in the world and by extension you’d imagine they also are the main reason for overpopulation right? Wrong, the amount of children born per woman is too low to grow a population by any significant amount. In fact, with the exception of the US, all of the countries’ populations will actually fall due to outputting less than two children per woman.
Conversely, the countries that will impact the world’s population will be the ones that have significantly more than two children per woman; India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria and Bangladesh are some of the biggest candidates. Nigeria’s population, in fact, will more than double each generation. This means that in just a matter of decades, Nigeria could be one of the most populous countries on the planet.
The difference between the two types of countries on this list is education for women. Due to a better level of education in China, the US, Russia and Japan, you see less women having large families and more women moving into becoming successful in their respective field. Many will trade having a family off entirely for career success. Meanwhile, the countries that have a lower level of education for women tend to see them degenerated down to being child-bearers alone with little to no opportunity or right for a career.
The solution is simple, if you want to stabilize the world’s population you need to start at the source: Educating young men and women on human rights, equality and giving them access to a good level of academic study. As this happens, it’s only natural that a culture’s perspective will change and in turn, the country will stabilize into a more self-sufficient, better motivated and stronger economy.
[Source: Wikipedia – List of Countries by Population]
[Source: CIA – World Fertility Rates]