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birb_cromble  1d ago (text post)   319 thread views

Weekly Finance Thread - 2026-08-01

A weekly thread to discuss financial matters - from personal all the way up to global.

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do we really want a lot more Africans who can't feed themselves when the global fertilizer crisis really hits

Malaria nets reduce infant mortality, and reduced infant mortality causes birth rates to drop. The only way out of the African population explosion is through it.

The Nigerian infant mortality rate more than halved over 60 years, while its births per woman barely nudged.

How about instead of “the only way to win later is to keep helping the other team score more points”-type defeatist hopium, we take the money spent on malaria nets and whatever else and pay teenaged African girls and young African women to get their tubes tied. This solution is a bit coup-complete, though.

The international aid-NGO complex has been funding African birth control for decades, with the explicit aim of reducing African population growth. Saying 'Africans should have fewer children' isn't some edgy right-wing take, it's the mainstream left-wing position. The only movements against international aid-funded birth control have been from the second Bush administration (due to its pro-life sympathies) and from Musk's gutting of USAID.

And we should expect there to be a lag between reduced infant mortality and reduced fertility. That's what happened during the industrial revolution, and it caused Britain's population to increase. But without reducing African mortality to literal malthusian levels (which would of course lead to mass emigration to the rest of the world) the only option at this stage is to reduce infant mortality further. And there really isn't a tension between reducing infant mortality and encouraging birth control. The same maternity hospitals that keep babies alive are the ones that implant long-lasting contraceptives in women who don't want any more kids.

As to whether it's 'working', well, according to the MICS survey Nigeria's TFR dropped from 5.8 to 4.6 in a mere five years. That's more than a whole child. If that trend continues, Nigeria is set to fall below replacement in about 12 years. It probably won't happen that fast, but I'm certain we will see the country drop below replacement in 20 years at most.

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