In this video Hans Rosling talks about population growth since 1960 to the present day and muses on what might happen by 2050 – using boxes as a visual aid to highlight how population growth occurs mainly in the developing world. 

While this video is an excellent aid to understanding how population is growing and how world demographics, in terms of how population sizesare changing in the developing compared to the developed world, there is little analysis of why population growth occurs, despite the rather obvious stateement that it’s linked to high birth rates.

Rosling says that he’s a ‘possibilist’ rather than an optimist or a pessimist – at the end of the video Rosling states that with a combination of the right assistance from the West, efficient use of green technologies and good governance in the developing world, we can effectively slow population growth in the developing world.  

The videos in this post, however, might convince you that far from the west assisting the developing world in brining its population under control, quite the opposite happens – the West sucks food resources out of the developing world – keeping poor countries stuck in a cycle of poverty – high birth rates – rapid population growth.