No, the issue is that most people don’t understand exponential growth. If you have even 5% population growth your population doubles roughly every 14-15 years. Growth itself is simply unsustainable.
I have the feeling speaking of percentage paints an incorrect picture. 5% yearly growth doesn’t sound much, but this might require a very high rate of children per person.
Let’s say we have 80 men and women, i.e. population of 160 evenly distributed between 1 and 80 years. Everyone dies at 80, every woman gets 3 children at 28. This means next year we loose 2, gain 3, i.e. have a growth rate of 1/160~0.6%. In 28 years, we have 1.5 women giving birth to 4.5 pops, i.e. 2.5/188~1.3%. Were it 4 children per woman, it would be 1.2% in the first years, 6/216~2.1%
You can roughly approximate the doubling time for a given percentage by dividing 70 cycles (years in case of annual growth) by the percentage. So 1% annual growth doubles the population every 70 years. 2% every 35 years. So pick whatever percentage you think is a realistic growth rate.
No, the issue is that most people don’t understand exponential growth. If you have even 5% population growth your population doubles roughly every 14-15 years. Growth itself is simply unsustainable.
I have the feeling speaking of percentage paints an incorrect picture. 5% yearly growth doesn’t sound much, but this might require a very high rate of children per person.
Let’s say we have 80 men and women, i.e. population of 160 evenly distributed between 1 and 80 years. Everyone dies at 80, every woman gets 3 children at 28. This means next year we loose 2, gain 3, i.e. have a growth rate of 1/160~0.6%. In 28 years, we have 1.5 women giving birth to 4.5 pops, i.e. 2.5/188~1.3%. Were it 4 children per woman, it would be 1.2% in the first years, 6/216~2.1%
You can roughly approximate the doubling time for a given percentage by dividing 70 cycles (years in case of annual growth) by the percentage. So 1% annual growth doubles the population every 70 years. 2% every 35 years. So pick whatever percentage you think is a realistic growth rate.