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Comment by baxtr | Hacker News Reader

I have an observation to share: Many countries where almost no one can afford a healthy diet according to this sites also have high population growth rates. For example, almost 96% of all people in Congo don't have enough money for healthy food, but the yearly growth rate is 3% or so.

Do you think this is correlated? And if so, isn't this then a vicious cycle?

EDIT: I'd really love to see an open discussion on this topic without a flame war or anything.

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It's a vicious cycle, but historically what we've seen is that drops in birth rate follows economic growth, not vice versa.

Poor economic conditions tends to mean parents rely on children for both work and for care in old age, and also correlates to lack of access to education on family planning as well as lack of access to contraceptives.

There are arguments to be made about precise cause and effect, but this pattern has been known for a long time; pretty much every developed country went through it, and almost all developing countries are on their way through the same pattern (almost all have seen birth rates drop dramatically, to the point the world is heading towards dropping population numbers within the next century).

Yup. It's called demographic transition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition

This is a great video explaining it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsBT5EQt348

I have the feeling (based on my own observations, so take it with a grain of salt) that education level affects both birth control and healthy diet. Even in first world countries.

Population Growth is highly correlated to girl's age at time of marriage, education and Infant Mortality rate. These factors are mostly worse in poor countries.

> For example, almost 96% of all people in Congo don't have enough money for healthy food

Does that... matter? How much do they rely on money to get food? Sub-Saharan Africa historically was a place where one woman working alone could support a household through horticulture.

"Income" in the calculation doesn't refer to just money. The author explicitly points out that food grown by subsistence farmers is included.

Most countries with very high pop growth are coming out of more or less preindustrial conditions - subsistence farming, children needed to feed the parents in age, lack of access to contraception, just getting better medical care to do recent child deaths, etc.

A different definition of health. Darwin would certainly call thier diet healthy enough. Any expanding population is at an evolutionary level more sucessfull than a stagnant population. Life expectancy, our modern concpet of health, is a very different story.

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