AHC: Prevent Overpopulation

What PODs can ensure that the rise of the population in the 1960s and 1970s doesn't go too unsustainable?

Oh and don't use apocalyptic scenarios for this one. Sure disasters are okay but don't make them the cause-chaos-throughout-whole-world thing to the point mankind is pushed to the brink of extinction.
 
Well, the population boom in the 1960s-1970s was largely due to the Green Revolution, and I would not exactly argue that the population growth is unsustainable. If the huge population growth of the Third World follows the demographic transition model, which every industrialized population has thus far, then there is really nothing unsustainable about the population growth in the long term, when the population will eventually begin to decrease.
 
What PODs can ensure that the rise of the population in the 1960s and 1970s doesn't go too unsustainable?

Oh and don't use apocalyptic scenarios for this one. Sure disasters are okay but don't make them the cause-chaos-throughout-whole-world thing to the point mankind is pushed to the brink of extinction.

Keep the Roman Empire alive and at the trajectory of the Nerva-Antonine dynasty (minus Commodous). If they continue to expand and consolidate without growing stale, we may be well ahead of OTL. That's just a WAG though.
 
If we assume the optimistic thesis, there's still the challenge of trying to do a significantly better job in managing periodic famines.
 

RousseauX

Donor
What PODs can ensure that the rise of the population in the 1960s and 1970s doesn't go too unsustainable?

Oh and don't use apocalyptic scenarios for this one. Sure disasters are okay but don't make them the cause-chaos-throughout-whole-world thing to the point mankind is pushed to the brink of extinction.

This is OTL.

Fertility rates having being falling across the world for decades, first world's fertility rate is below replacement.

There isn't an overpopulation problem in the world save for possibly subsaharan Africa.
 

RousseauX

Donor
Keep the Roman Empire alive and at the trajectory of the Nerva-Antonine dynasty (minus Commodous). If they continue to expand and consolidate without growing stale, we may be well ahead of OTL. That's just a WAG though.

Keeping a Roman Empire alive doesn't help because you had a malthusian society. Which meant that agriculture productivity doesn't increase in proportion with population. This leads to malnutrition during periods of stability and eventually a massive plague (the antonine plague, plague of justainian, or the black death) comes and wipes out enough of the population so that they are below carrying capacity again.
 
I don't understand the thread. What are you discussing? We have more people than we did in 1970 but on average people are better fed.
 
in 1972, the Club of Rome published "Limits to Growth" that scared the girls in my town into taking birth control pills.
Seriously, birth rates had been dropping in Quebec since the 1950s. Both birth control pills and birth control pills became more widely available after I was born (1957).
Was I that miserable a child?
Hah!
Hah!
 
Okay, maybe if decolonization after WWII had been earlier and done more with the idea that we're going to have to do it for real. We can't just edge-cheat and prop up dictatorships and hope for sweetheart deals. We're going to have to engage in trade which is at least relatively honest and maybe more so and we're going to have to build up our trade partners over time, again in a relatively honest way.

And then the newly independent nations would have more economic base for such things as social security, child healthcare so parents are more confident each child will survive, and --- what I have read is the most effective --- educational opportunities for girls and young women. This last factor on average encourages young women to delay starting families and to have smaller families.
 
Okay, maybe if decolonization after WWII had been earlier and done more with the idea that we're going to have to do it for real. We can't just edge-cheat and prop up dictatorships and hope for sweetheart deals. We're going to have to engage in trade which is at least relatively honest and maybe more so and we're going to have to build up our trade partners over time, again in a relatively honest way.

And then the newly independent nations would have more economic base for such things as social security, child healthcare so parents are more confident each child will survive, and --- what I have read is the most effective --- educational opportunities for girls and young women. This last factor on average encourages young women to delay starting families and to have smaller families.

How does this work?
 

Deleted member 67076

What you need is to have the demographic transition happen earlier, which in turn means a richer, more educated and more economically developed world.

Easiest way to do that would be to end and lessen colonialism earlier and prevent the Cold War, somehow.

I think the site has mentioned that an Earlier WWI or WWII might have led to these conclusions, so your best bet IMO is to work with that and have the following decades be much nicer to the Third World.

Perhaps WWI in First Moroccan Crisis manages to cause the European Empires to destroy/bankrupt/seriously weaken themselves? Which gives breathing room to China and the Ottomans (Thus giving more development to vast swaths of the World) as the grip on Africa by Europe slips. Decolonization by the 40s-50s and then the rest of the century goes off easier for them than OTL.

Not sure on the plausibility per se however.
 
Top