Miscellaneous desk
< June 23	<< May \| June \| Jul >>	June 25 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Miscellaneous Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

June 24

Fertility Rate and Population

In the past, people had more children. So why didn't they have to worry about population? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 14.202.204.226 (talk) 02:51, 24 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Higher death rates, and, in particular, infant mortality. There were also some cases, such as the first people to arrive on a new continent, where it was desirable for the population to increase dramatically. And, certain inventions, like agriculture, allowed far more people to live on the same land, so population explosions were also OK then. StuRat (talk) 02:58, 24 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Also the need for a big army in wartime often made population growth seem like a good thing, this was a major concern as late as the Nazis in Germany in the 1930s. [1]

As User:StuRat says above, improvements in agriculture such as enclosure of fields, crop rotation, farm machinery, introduction of new crops like potatoes and new overseas sources of food like the Great Plains, all meant that the masses could generally avoid starvation, although famines were a fairly regular feature of most European economies before the 20th century. Expansion of the cities in the industrial revolution absorbed surplus population from rural areas, urban overcrowding was not an issue that governments concerned themselves with until fairly recently. As a last resort, colonial expansion meant that there was always somewhere new to emigrate to. Alansplodge (talk) 11:09, 24 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Plagues and natural disasters could also set back population growth quite dramatically. Europe's population is estimated to have dropped from 450 million to 350 million as a result of the Black Death. If you look at any of the graphs showing world population you find that there was very slow growth for most of the time, and only in the last couple of centuries has over-population become and issue. Wymspen (talk) 14:42, 24 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Cynic: And if they ever ran out of unfarmed farmable land and outsiders they could trade or rob food from or move to the problem was solved by splitting into teams and killing each other till there was enough food again. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 19:27, 24 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I can't think of a conflict which fits that model in the last thousand years, with the exception of the German quest for Lebensraum in the Second World War. Were you thinking of anything specific? Alansplodge (talk) 19:40, 24 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Wouldn't the war supposedly be about religious differences or who runs the place or something but really that's just the immediate trigger? Of course this isn't the only way for wars to start. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 19:54, 24 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Of course, but I thought you were suggesting food supply as a direct casus belli, which I'm not sure happens very often. Alansplodge (talk) 00:45, 25 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I'd thought this happened to Easter Island (the standard story being that after their statue fetish made them run out of trees they lost the ability to leave) Maybe not. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 01:49, 25 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Food isn't the only resource needed for survival. There's also water, land to grow the food, shelter, and more complex things like access to a port, when needed for food deliveries. StuRat (talk) 06:10, 25 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

In the US through the mid 19th century most of the workforce were farmers. 72% of the workforce were farmers in 1820 and 64% in 1850.The parents needed lots of boys to help the father with work demanding strength such as clearing land, building fences and structures, digging out stumps, plowing with horses or mules, and lots of girls to clean and cook, manage poultry and dairy animals, garden, weave, make and repair clothing, and preserve food. Any teenagers surplus to the labor needs could be hired out to neighbors needing domestic or agricultural workers. The US population increased by a third each decades in the first several decades, due to immigration as well as natural increase. Another mouth to feed did not necessarily decrease the standard of living of an early farm family, like it would for a wage earner living in a city and working for an employer, since it meant another worker who did not need to be paid or purchased from a slave broker. Additional land was available to purchase or rent, perhaps in some location further west, as families might migrate from the east coast to Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, etc. A farm family with just the married couple or them and one or two children would be less able to have a flourishing operation. They also might provide for the parents when they got too old to work.Edison (talk) 13:30, 25 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

You might be interested in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, which discusses overpopulation, among other causes. Carbon Caryatid (talk) 16:42, 25 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]