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Hans Rosling: Religions and babies
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mattyb
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Sep 10, 2014, 05:31 PM
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezVk1ahRF78

Love this guy's talks, especially the TED ones.
     
Waragainstsleep
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Sep 10, 2014, 08:45 PM
 
He was doing well until the very where he failed to mention that some religions have rather strong opinions on family planning, but moreso when he said the 'great fill-up' has nothing to do with living longer when of course it absolutely does. Its the only reason it can happen if the number of children remains constant.
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Doc HM
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Sep 11, 2014, 02:19 AM
 
If religion has it's effect on family planning then the data wouldn't show a drop across all religions since the 60s. In fact it shows that family needs trump religious dogma.

Also the boxes were a rough guide. For the fill up all that is required is that life expectancy remains as it is now. Since it is going up there will be a hump as the aging population sticks around.

I guess one unmentioned factor or influence in the outcome might be did the world go through a period when religions were less militant or radical which allowed the drop. If we are in a more "fundamental" era (so to speak) the effect of dogma may alter.
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Waragainstsleep
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Sep 11, 2014, 04:16 AM
 
I didn't mean to say that religion was definitely having an effect, but he emphasised the importance of family planning as having an effect and it seems wrong to dismiss the influence that religion (or lack thereof) may have had on that.

I don't see how a steady average life expectancy would cause the fill up. If life expectancy is staying still, and the birth rate is staying still, then the population is going to stay still, which it isn't. He even implies that countries where the birth rates have dropped are experiencing improvements in life expectancy and that is what is driving the lower birth rates because less children are dying early.
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el chupacabra
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Sep 11, 2014, 02:21 PM
 
Originally Posted by Waragainstsleep View Post
He was doing well until the very where he failed to mention that some religions have rather strong opinions on family planning,
His point was that religion world wide isn't the primary driving factor of growth. World wide he linked baby production to poverty and primitive/ancient culture separate from religion. If we look at the US, the contribution the non-church-goer-trailer-trash crowd makes to population growth eclipses that of the religious crowd. Churches meanwhile are pushing members to have responsible sex or no sex at all until marriage. The church is teaching people to be responsible and getting people to have less babies later in life. There's even a small movement in the Mormon community to build large families by adopting troubled kids.
but moreso when he said the 'great fill-up' has nothing to do with living longer when of course it absolutely does. Its the only reason it can happen if the number of children remains constant.
I think you misunderstood how the "fill-up" works. The fill-up would happen with or without life expectancy going up. Historically there has always been more young people than old people at any given instant as children outnumber their parents. There was less people in the 1940's than in the 80's. As People from the 30's era enter old age we don't see them contributing much to our overall population which is mostly made up of younger people ( baby boom etc). But all those young people and babies from the 50's that contribute so much to the overall population now will become old and they will be a much higher percentage of the overall population than their parents were so long as they don't have a pyramid of babies like their parents did. There is no 1 to 1 trade off of babies for old/dieing people or generation for generation. The reality is how early in life you have kids also plays a major role in population growth, and there tends to be several generations of kids born before 1 generation dies simply because people have kids so early in life. A 1 to 1 trade of generations will work its way through the system and be noticeable at about 10-11 billion. The reason it's a weird explanation he gave is it's not really a "fill-up" of people entering the elderly class even though thats what it looks like, it's more of an emptying of babies on the left side of his boxes stack until it's level with the number of people becoming elderly. Otherwise there has always been a "filling-up" of elderly, it's just been unnoticeable because the filling-up of babies was much faster.
     
mattyb  (op)
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Sep 11, 2014, 02:43 PM
 
Bollocks.
     
Waragainstsleep
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Sep 11, 2014, 02:52 PM
 
Its genuinely interesting that religion doesn't seem to have much of an impact on the global population. or rather it doesn't seem to any more. Its just not great practice to state unequivocally that something that might well be heavily influenced by religion is a causative factor and that the religion is not. Perhaps thats another research project, but he shouldn't be making such a sweeping statement either way is all I'm saying.

If the rate of children in the population is 2 per woman, than actually that means the next generation will be the same size as the last one and therefore the total population cannot grow unless the number of generations still living increases. The only way that happens is if people live longer on average. If the percentage of women is way more than 50% this reasoning may falter but while they may be more like 60% or so, many of these extra women will probably be above child bearing age because women have always had a longer life expectancy than men so my reasoning should stand.
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el chupacabra
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Sep 11, 2014, 03:28 PM
 
If 200 million person who haven't had kids yet couple up and (magically) had 2 kids tomorrow (or in 9 months, the time frame doesn't matter), and that was all kids they had in their life, do you picture the population increasing or staying the same. If will definitely increase. Im saying that just because 200 mil are born doesn't mean 200 mil will die at the same time to make sure the population stays the same. Even if life expectancy stays at say 77, there's still plenty of people with 20 years left in their life before they reach their life expectancy.

This is because older generations can die at the same rate younger generations are born but not at the same time younger generations are born. So the population will grow until rate = time, which is about 11 billion, then it will stay the same just like you're saying.

IOW Humans aren't squid, they don't die immediately after having babies creating a 1 to 1 trade off, thats why we dont see the effects of lower birth rates till years down the road.
( Last edited by el chupacabra; Sep 11, 2014 at 03:39 PM. )
     
Waragainstsleep
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Sep 11, 2014, 04:49 PM
 
The number of children per woman fell to two. If the birth rate falls then population growth will fall unless another mechanism compensates. Since the population is predicted to keep rising for a while, this can logically only be a higher life expectancy.

Now actually since the number of women is higher than it was, they could have fewer children per woman and still grow the population, but this wouldn't change the age demographics. In order for their to be a higher proportion of older people, either the life expectancy has to increase, or it has to decrease substantially because it would mean that younger people would be dying a lot more than they were. (That seems like it would require a very nasty plague or a big war and we have had neither in 70 years). I feel like such a decrease would have warranted a mention in the talk.
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