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DON'T PANIC — Hans Rosling showing the facts about population

Gapminder Foundation · 3.3M views · 2014-12-15 · 58:51

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Overview

Hans Rosling uses data and animated statistics to show how world population is changing, why birth rates fall as child survival and wealth rise, and why population is expected to peak around 11 billion. It also tackles common misconceptions about Africa and family planning.

On Hacker News

HN repeatedly recommends it to counter overpopulation alarm with data on falling birth rates.

Recommended by 8 HN people across 11 months · HN mentions 2017–2021

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What people said

Isinlor · 2019-11 · Strong recommendation

The issue here is mostly with the countries in extreme poverty. Countries with average fertility rate of 3 and higher. Women in countries with the highest fertility index often do not control when they get pregnant. Having 6 and more children is rarely effect of conscious family planning. It's effect of lack of education, lack of access to contraception, forced sex in marriage etc. Sometimes having many children is an insurance policy in case some children will die before they reach productive age. We really should be addressing this type of issues underlying uncontrolled population growth. People should be able to choose when they want to have children, how many children they want, they should be educated on how to provide for their children, and certainly people should not be afraid that some part of their offspring will die. It has nothing to do with penalizing having children like they did in China. I really recommend, "DON'T PANIC — Hans Rosling showing the facts about population". He shows how family planning looks like in practice in countries like Bangladesh, so that westerners can imagine what are we talking about: [VIDEO] Dealing with global warming is going bad and we should panic about that, but humanity is making great progress on controlling population growth. There is really no issue with you having 3 children. Western population will be declining anyway as fertility rate in western countries is mostly below 2. Just please, support political, systematical chang

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Isinlor · 2019-09 · Strong recommendation

Because there is no world overpopulation. People talk about overpopulation since ancient times. [LINK] Currently standard of living are growing almost all over the world and human population is predicted to pick and stabilize at around 11 billion. I really recommend "DON'T PANIC — Hans Rosling showing the facts about population" [VIDEO] What's also interesting in his video is the fact that people tend to be very misinformed about state of the world affairs. E.g. when asked questions about certain statistics, they do worse than random. And the better educated you are the more misinformed you may be.

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jdietrich · 2017-11 · Strong recommendation

Until the modern era, the global birth rate was fairly constant at about six per woman. The population growth we've experienced over the last century is mostly to do with child survival. Before 1900, the child mortality rate in India was over 50%. If you need children to care for you in old age and expect most of your children to die, you're likely to have a lot of them. When child survival improved, attitudes changed. Parents no longer want three or four children to work on the family farm, they want one or two children to become doctors or engineers. Economic development and the availability of reliable contraception have made that aspiration practical. If you're interested in the topic, I can highly recommend this lecture by the late Hans Rosling: [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Gapminder Foundation, played through YouTube.

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