Hans Rosling Quotes
Beyond 2050 the world population may start to decrease if women across the world will have, on average, less than 2 children. But that decrease will be slow.
Rosling, Hans, Anna Rosling Rönnlund, and Ola Rosling. Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. Flatiron Books, 2018.
In Burundi, family land is divided among the male children of a family. The average Burundian woman has 6.3 children, nearly triple the international fertility rate. With this fertility rate, the plots of land for each person inevitably get smaller and smaller over time. At 10,745 square miles, Burundi is slightly smaller than the U.S. state of Maryland, but it holds nearly twice as many people: about 10 million. The small plots of land are inefficient to farm and provide subsistence. So the nation was in a crises as there was little industrialization and land was essential for existence for most Burundians. See {35808} and {35809}.
This was the first issue of the publication. Population shortages vexed governments as much as population surpluses.
His data was from the last three decades of the 20th century. The larger a country’s population gets, the more economic growth it takes to improve or even maintain the standard of living. If this and land and other resources are in short supply relative to the population, there is more dissatisfaction and the probability of civil conflict increases. See {621892} for a similar view.
Hans Rosling was a Swedish physician, academic, and public speaker. He was a professor of international health at Karolinska Institute and was the co-founder and chairman of the Gapminder Foundation, which developed the Trendalyzer software system. He held presentations around the world, including several TED Talks in which he promoted the use of data (and data visualization) to explore development issues. His posthumously published book Factfulness, coauthored with Anna Rosling Rönnlund and Ola Rosling, became an international bestseller.
