The Ignorance of Humans Makes More Humans Seem Like a Good Idea

Over 7 billion people.  By most accounts that is too many.  But yet when talking to people about over population a good number of people talk as though a decline in population is a bad thing.  I guess their ignorance is bliss but for the rest of us it is horror.

Nobody seems to understand that unless you drop dead the day you become a parent every birth is adding to the population.  They always seem to go back to saying that some people die, but let us be honest, in modern times, and with modern medicine the percentage of people dying has dropped in developed nations.  People are living longer than ever before, there are fewer infant deaths, and as such the population is sky rocketing.

I asked a question on WebAnswers a while ago - you may want to click here to see all the answers http://www.webanswers.com/relationships/parenting-kids/for-maintained-population-how-many-kids-per-couple-729bb1 - I was quite amazed to see how ignorant people were and how many of them remarked that a drop in population was a "bad thing".  Feel free to click here to join WebAnswers and post your own answer to the question if you want to do so.

Here is the problem people are having, I ask how many kids can a couple have to maintain the population.

Suppose they have two kids.  That is doubling the population because two parents is now four people.  Okay, suppose this is a very closed society and forget the rules of inbreeding and incest, let us imagine the two kids get together and have two kids.  The parents are likely still alive, so two people is now six.  Since people are living longer than ever before it is likely that the two kids will reproduce and have two more kids while the original couple is still alive, bringing the total people to eight.  By then with any luck somebody will die, but the population was not maintained it will never go back to being just two!  The population has risen and will remain high in a cycle as long as people do not have more than two, but the initial birth of two kids was growth and should not be denied as such.

I had one kid, then had my tubes tied.  Two parents plus one kid is growth and I am not too stupid to deny that.  However my husband died early when my daughter was 5 so I guess the population did balance itself then.  But let us not kid ourselves into saying that two kids is maintaining the population.