Interesting, lots of downvotes and several upvotes (saw it jump up and down several times). I guess this splits our community. Too bad the point is apparently deemed inappropriate for discussion. I would have enjoyed to learn what smart people here think we should do about this.
It's not inappropriate for discussion, it's just wrong. People who are rich and healthy don't have kids above replacement rates. We don't know why but we've observed the effect within countries, between countries, and across a broad range of cultural and religious groups. Economic improvement and public health aren't in opposition to population control measures, they are population control measures.
The correlation doesn't seem to hold at the high end, and much of the data in the western world confounds population growth due to fertility (still low) with population growth due to immigration (which has upticked across the board in recent years). As far as I know, though, the effect is still strong in the delta range that the Gates foundation is targeting.
Well, I wish what you were saying was true, but recent data show that it is not, see for example [1]
Furthermore, depletion of resources is not a simple numbers game: a rich person produces several orders more CO2 than a poor person to name just one example. If Africa becomes wealthy enough to come anywhere close to Americans for meat consumption there is going to be a huge issue.
Population control of some kind is so much easier now than if we wait 20 years and Chinese-like draconian measures become necessary.
"These new predictions are drawing criticism. "Raftery's projections are too high for Africa, because they don't include the fact that female education is the key driver of fertility decline," says Wolfgang Lutz of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria."
