Latest Blog Post

Rosling was right

Ages ago, when we were building the practice, I came across Factfulness by Hans Rosling. 

It's one of the most extraordinary and life-changing books I've ever read, and I think you should go and read it.

So why not buy it here?

Hans Rosling is no longer with us, but you should seek him out too, and his Wikipedia page is here.

He was undoubtedly a genius.

What he taught us in Factfulness was that you have to read the news and then read beyond the news and then find out the facts.

One of the extraordinary things he talked about in Factfulness was the lie of population growth and why we were never going to reach 10 billion, even though people had talked about it and said it would be the end of the world.

The end of the world will come from nuclear weapons or a pandemic or a meteorite, or climate change, but it won't come from overpopulation.

People laughed at this and spat at it and said it was nonsense, but Rosling demonstrated that population growth was part of an S-shaped curve (draw an S in the air and understand that we're currently in the middle part of the s but are heading to the top part which will go over the top and back down again). 

And then you realise when you read the news much more objectively and from a much better source that the current projections of China's population based on their birth rates at the present time is that they will fall from 1.4 billion to 800 million by the end of the century.

That is an almost 50% reduction in the population of the most populous country in the world.

Over the past 30 years, India's population growth has dropped almost exponentially from seven per household to less than two.

The UK sits at 1.7 and will not get any higher.

One of the reasons for this is that everyone is leaving childbearing till later.

Changes in gender rules have made it much less acceptable for women to sacrifice themselves 'just to raise a family'.

Men are much less fertile because of pollution and poisoning within the natural environment, and also, people are hugely more stressed, and fertility rates are dropping like a brick.

It's one of the places that Rosling was absolutely right in his book, and it's fascinating to watch this.

As we head towards what must be the end of hyper-capitalism, we seem to be in a bit of a spot.

We're going to produce fewer and fewer young people and more and more older people.

This will call for a massive reinvention and redesign of how society works, and it will take a reallocation of wealth from the higher end of society way down to the lower in one form or another.

Another thing to consider in the news at the same time is that ten days in a row in Phoenix, Arizona, the temperature has been greater than 50°C at the same time that 16 days in a row in Italy, they've had temperatures greater than 40 degrees. 

Rosling was right.

It won't be population growth that kills us.

It'll be the climate.

What are we doing about climate?

By Colin Campbell on 29/07/23 18:00