THINK Global School
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 8 months, 2017–2023
16:37 · 2M views · Dec 1, 2015
Hans Rosling uses population statistics to explain why the world population will level off rather than grow without limit. He shows that falling child mortality and rising prosperity lead to smaller families.
Offered as an approachable, data-driven rebuttal to Malthusian overpopulation fears.
8 comments from Hacker News
Hans Rosling rebuts this, especially in Factfulness.* If you look at population trends in countries worldwide, populations routinely level out only after improving underlying economic and health conditions. When infant mortality is high and children are an economic necessity, parents compensate by having many kids. When a country gets better healthcare and better economic opportunities, there's an initial generation of population explosion as more kids suddenly survive childhood, but then the population immediately plateaus and begins to recede. The epidemiological studies and population data is overwhelming that the simple model Malthus used fails to explain human behavior. * Also in some videos online: 1. [LINK] 2. this video But to put in a closing plug for Factfulness, it's one of the best simple and accessible primers how to avoid major cognitive biases, and also teaches a lot about the current state of the world.
What do you think the benefits of mandatory population control are? Have you seen any of Hans Rosling's [1] talks on the topic of population growth? After watching, would you still think there is need for mandatory population control? [1] this video
I highly recommend by the late Hans Rosling: Why the world population won’t exceed 11 billion. It explains quite well what the sister comment by riffraff refers to. [1]: this video
This video might be more approachable: this video I'm sure it won't convince all of the Malthusian doom and gloom sorts, but it's worth a try.
>as a result of that, the world's population has been growing and growing At first yes, but not recently, now the opposite is true, if anything. We haven't had exponential growth since the 60s and are currently headed towards a steady state population because of improved standards of living. Turns out health and properity leads to smaller families. We do still have significant growth, but that is largely because we're filling out the older demographics in many countries, the birth rate is largely under control already, and once the current generations spread through we'll be in a stead state (around 11 billion). In fact, there's no way to _stop_ this growth now, short of killing or sterilising people, since the birthrate is already under control, we're just waiting for the last exponential generations to get old. see this video Long term, we probably should encourage (slightly) sub-2 children per family to let the total population shrink, but that will take a long time (unless something disasterous happens)