Population problems in History Some sociologists and politicians have been worried about the problem of population growing for a century. It is true that the population of the world always keeps growing. Some statistics show approximately 100 babies are born every 15 seconds, and it will cause worse situation on both public and private fields. In the meantime, how can we explain this phenomenon that many countries encourage their people to increase re-production rate while other countries enforce a strict birth control policy? In a historical point of view, we can see this problem in the following three periods of time: in the difficult time; in the ages of birth control; in the modernization era.
In the past when it was in the difficult time, people made efforts to increase birth rate, but population growing was finite. There were three elements to limit the population. First of all it's natural disasters. They often killed people in a huge number when the public rescue systems hadn't been developed. The second one was shortage of health care which included sanitation, medical and nutrition. Most people hardly could live longer than 50. Many babies died soon after they were born, and millions of human being often past away after flu diseases (like Black disease in Europe in 17 century) spread around. The third was wars, people killed people, countries destroyed each other so often, a great deal of people were suffering and furthermore lost their lives because of that.
After World War II, the world enjoyed a comparative peaceful life in which baby-boomers arrived and population growing rate was on the rise. Many countries realized that and started to engage to control the birth rate. The most famous case was the one-child policy in China. Even though the technology of abortion was mature, the authoritarian in China used the political power intervened the civilian affair cruelly. Many baby girls were killed silently by their own parents soon after they were born, just because they were in the wrong gender, their parents wanted a boy, and government only allowed one child in one family. That was the worst example in the world.
The population situation in the developed countries changed gradually when they were modernized and became rich. It is amazing that people delivered their children frequently in difficult time and at poor places. When they were in good living circumstances, they became too busy (or too lazy) to give birth. As the cost to raise children went higher, most families even couldn't afford to have one or two more children in the wealthy society; therefore, the population growing rate slid down in the developed countries. This situation forced those countries to provide many subsidies to encourage people to re-produce the next generation but still in vain, and this was the reason why those countries opened their boarder to welcome the immigrants and foreign labours to maintain their economy growing.
The modernization of societies increases the happiness and comfort for the human being, and it's their main purpose. They didn't expect the side effect, the low re-production rate, would happen. Help those countries which still suffer from the population growing problem to become wealthy, their birth rate will be going down automatically. Talking about this problem, I prefer the modernization itself to be a moderate solution and drive the equality a little bit between the southern countries and the northern countries.
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