Religion, making babies and ‘peak child’: brilliant new Hans Rosling video
Break out the champagne, the sword-swallowing data guru is back, with a brilliant performance on religion and fertility, delivered, as far as I can tell, in Qatar. Conclusion: ‘religion has very little to do with the number of children in the world’, and fertility is falling rapidly, everywhere (due to women’s education and paid jobs + access to birth control) – the world has reached a 2 billion ‘peak child’ level. Compulsory viewing. And his entire back catalogue of TED talks (including the sword swallowing one) is on his Gapminder website.
update: OMG the Rosling backlash has begun, c/o Aid Thoughts and Lawrence Haddad coming over all grumpy. It just gets better.
Tags: birth control, family planning, fertility, Hans Rosling, religion May 23rd, 2012 Posted in Gender, General, Health and Education, Poverty, how change happens
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May 23rd, 2012 at 8:23 am
Excellent video Duncan! I hope this will be seen by Andrew Mitchell. The focus on family planning of the DFID ‘golden moment’ is both ideological (harking back to pre-Cairo times) rather that based on the kind of evidence the video gives, and dangerous for the possible abuses of women’s (and men’s) reproductive rights and health it can lead to as it happened in the past (remember the Indian ‘emergency’ and the Indonesian ’safaris’?)
May 23rd, 2012 at 6:05 pm
What a brilliant video – so impressed with the explanation of population trends with boxes. Will definitely look at his other TED videos – thanks!
May 23rd, 2012 at 8:39 pm
I’d like to see the same data exercise with Catholic majority countries distinguished from Protestant-majority countries. My guess: while some Catholic majority, like Italy, have sharply reduced fertility despite Church teaching, others, like the Philippines, have been delayed in the demographic transiton by the teachings of the Church. Hans is a master presenter and great demographer but he hasn’t yet persuaded me that religious teachings are irrelevant to fertility.
May 24th, 2012 at 10:06 am
No Duncan, don’t be seduced by the flashy graphics!
http://aidthoughts.org/?p=3391
May 26th, 2012 at 12:56 pm
No, Hans Rosling did not say what your quote of his conclusion states. Hans certainly is a master presenter and a great salesman of statistical data and how to interpret them, but it’s hard to believe that even he would be able to convince many people that ‘fertility has very little to do with the number of children in the world’.
What he said was, of course, that ‘religion has very little to do with the number of children in the world’!
May 27th, 2012 at 7:35 am
Oops, thanks Dag, have corrected the text – bit worrying that you’re the first person to point it out!