Looks like the population will grow to 10 billion primarily fueled through Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia, but it really depends on whether those economies can have their own "economic miracle" by utilizing the new workers being born. If not, they'll go through a population boom and bust cycle and it might be another 50 years until their next one. If they do utilize it well, the population is predicted to drop, perhaps to 5 billion, in the next few hundred years.
Economic success is associated with reduced fertility, not greater fertility. (And it's almost certainly causal.) If regions don't have economic miracles, that will mean higher population, not lower.
One part of this came up at the end of the article, namely that increased childhood survival rate leads to decreasing number of births. It makes a lot of sense to me that this would correlate with overall improvements of living standards.
If you want to have a family four children, I'd think it's pretty universally agreed that it's better if you only have to give birth four times to do it than five, because all four babies survive childhood.
That doesn't negate that there are other factors, especially in countries that already have low birth rates and high childhood survival rates. It was just a factor I hadn't paid much attention to before or heard people mentioning very often.
In theory it would make sense that fertility falls a bit with lower childhood mortality, but your explanation doesn't explain the data that lower childhood mortality is associated with fewer surviving children.
Not an expert but AFAIK these demographic transitions are when an economy has the highest share of its population as economically active adults. It's a well known challenge to use that opportunity to develop and become rich enough to deal with the following ageing population and avoid the middle income trap.
If we can continue to figure out basic needs better like housing and healthcare then it may not always be the case that one must sacrifice progeny for economic progress.
Hell just high speed rail could encourage populating less desirable areas if a 30 minute trip to the beach was a weekend event.
This is what I've always heard, but I've also heard that the financial precarity of young people in the west is leading them to have fewer children. Which seems mildly contradictory.
If you are precarious now, but expect or hope to be better off in future, you will delay having children. If you don't expect better prospects, then children are the best available investment in your future.
If you give people resources conditional on them having children (e.g., free child care), they will of course on the margin have slightly more children. But it's a mistake to interpret this as "financial precarity" causing reduced fertility, because if you give them more unconditional money they have fewer children.
I am referring more to the middle income trap, to be clear [0]. If a country fails to become at the level of prosperity of the first world, it will take some time for them to try again, as its level of prosperity is enough for many of its populace to not have children but not high enough to truly prosper.
Not sure why you are downvoted. Every example in recent history is rise in population followed by drop or stable population. No example of cycle I know of.
I see more anti-natalists than anything these days. Separately, I see more people who don't want children than those who do, at least online. I am one of the former in that I don't want children, but of course I can extrapolate what might happen if many did not have children. Of course, it is not my job or problem to care about such a scenario in the first place.
The plagues, several other pandemics, WWI & II, countless countries that have committed genocide, countless deadly civil wars, Taiping rebellion, French Revolution, Irish Famine, Bengal Famine, Russian Famine, several Indian famines, several Chinese famines, etc.
