Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think (15 page)

On the left, the chart shows the ages of the 7 billion people alive in 2015: 2 billion were aged 0 to 15, 2 billion aged 15 to 30, and then there were 1 billion each in the 30 to 45, 45 to 60, and 60 to 75 age groups.

In 2030, there will be 2 billion new 0- to 15-year-olds. Everyone else will have grown older. The 0- to 15-year-olds of today will have become 15- to 30-year-olds. The 15- to 30-year-olds of today will have become 2 billion 30- to 45-year-olds. There are only 1 billion 30- to 45-year-olds today. So, without any increase in the number of children being born, and without people living for longer, there will be 1 billion more adults.

The 1 billion new adults come not from new children, but from children and young adults who have already been born.

For three generations, this pattern will repeat itself. In 2045, the 2 billion 30- to 45-year-olds will become 45- to 60-year-olds and we will have another 1 billion adults. In 2060, the 2 billion 45- to 60-year-olds will become 60- to 75-year-olds and we will have another 1 billion adults. But look what happens next. From 2060, each generation of 2 billion people will be replaced by another generation of 2 billion people. The fast growth stops.

The large increase in population is going to happen not because there are more children. And not, in the main, because old folks are living longer. In fact the UN experts do predict that by 2100, world life expectancy will have increased by roughly 11 years, adding 1 billion old people to the total and taking it to around 11 billion. The large increase in population will happen mainly because the children who already exist today are going to grow up and “fill up” the diagram with 3 billion more adults. This “fill-up effect” takes three generations, and then it is done.

That’s actually all you need to know to understand the method that the UN experts use to not
just
draw a straight line into the future.

(This explanation is a brutal simplification. Many die before they reach 75, and many parents have their children after they reach 30. But even including these facts makes no difference to the big picture.)

When a population is not growing over a long period of time, and the population curve is flat, this must mean that each generation of new parents is the same size as the previous one. For thousands of years up to 1800 the population curve was almost flat. Have you heard people say that humans used to live in balance with nature?

Well, yes, there was a balance. But let’s avoid the rose-tinted glasses. Until 1800, women gave birth to six children on average. So the population should have increased with each generation. Instead, it stayed more or less stable. Remember the child skeletons in the graveyards of the past? On average four out of six children died before becoming parents themselves, leaving just two surviving children to parent the next generation. There was a balance. It wasn’t because humans
lived
in balance with nature. Humans
died
in balance with nature. It was utterly brutal and tragic.

Today, humanity is once again reaching a balance. The number of parents is no longer increasing. But this balance is dramatically different from the old balance. The new balance is nice: the typical parents have two children, and neither of them dies. For the first time in human history, we
live
in balance.

The population grew from 1.5 billion in 1900 to 6 billion in 2000 because humanity went through a transition from one balance to another during the twentieth century, a unique period of human history when two parents on average produced more than two children who survived to become parents themselves in the next generation.

That period of imbalance is the reason why today the two youngest generations are larger than the others. That period of imbalance is the reason behind the fill-up. But the new balance is already achieved: the annual number of births is no longer increasing. If extreme poverty keeps falling, and sex education and contraception keep spreading, then the world population will keep growing fast, but only until the inevitable fill-up is completed.

Even after I show these charts onstage, people come up to me after the presentation and tell me that the charts can’t be correct because, you know,
“People in Africa and Latin America still have many children. And religious people refuse contraceptives and still have huge families.”

Skilled journalists pick and choose dramatic exceptional people in their reports. In the mass media we sometimes see examples of very religious people, whether living in traditional ways or leading seemingly modern lives, who proudly show us their very large families as evidence of faith. Such documentary films, TV shows, and media reports give the impression that religion leads to much larger families. But whatever their religion—whether they are Catholics, Jews, or Muslims—these families share one quality. They are the exceptions!

In reality, the connection between religion and babies per woman is not so impressive. Throughout this book I discuss how the media chooses its exceptional stories, and in chapter 7 I will debunk the myth of religion and large families. For now, let’s look at the single factor that does have a strong connection with large families: extreme poverty.

When combining all the parents living on Levels 2, 3, and 4, from every region of the world, and of every religion or no religion, together they have on average two children. No kidding! This includes the populations of Iran, Mexico, India, Tunisia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka, just to name a few examples.

The poorest 10 percent combined still have five children on average. And on average, every second family living in extreme poverty loses one of their children before he or she reaches the age of five. That is shamefully high, but still far better than the ghastly levels that kept population growth down in the bad old times.

When people hear that the population is growing, they intuitively think it will continue to grow unless something is done. They intuitively visualize the trend continuing into the future. But remember, for my grandchild Mino to stop growing taller, nothing drastic needs to be done.

Melinda Gates runs a philanthropic foundation together with her husband, Bill. They have spent billions of dollars to save the lives of millions of children in extreme poverty by investing in primary health care and education. Yet intelligent and well-meaning people keep contacting their foundation saying that they should stop. The argument goes like this:
“If you keep saving poor children, you’ll kill the planet by causing overpopulation.”

I have also heard this argument after some of my presentations, from people who may have the best intentions and want to save the planet for future generations. It sounds intuitively correct. If more children survive, the population
just
increases. Right? No! Completely wrong.

Parents in extreme poverty need many children for the reasons I set out earlier: for child labor but also to have extra children in case some children die. It is the countries with the highest child mortality rates, like Somalia, Chad, Mali, and Niger, where women have the most babies: between five and eight. Once parents see children survive, once the children are no longer needed for child labor, and once the women are educated and have information about and access to contraceptives, across cultures and religions both the men and the women instead start dreaming of having fewer, well-educated children.

“Saving poor children
just
increases the population” sounds correct, but the opposite is true. Delaying the escape from extreme poverty
just
increases the population. Every generation kept in extreme poverty will produce an even larger next generation. The only proven method for curbing population growth is to eradicate extreme poverty and give people better lives, including education and contraceptives. Across the world, parents then have chosen for themselves to have fewer children. This transformation has happened across the world but it has never happened without lowering child mortality.

This discussion so far has left out the most important point, which is the moral imperative to help people escape from the misery and indignity of extreme poverty. The argument that we must save the planet for future people, not yet born, is difficult for me to hear when people are suffering today. But when it comes to child mortality, we don’t have to choose between the present and the future, or between our hearts and our heads: they all point in the same direction. We should do everything we can to reduce child mortality, not only as an act of humanity for living suffering children but to benefit the whole world now and in the future.

The best way of controlling the instinct to always see straight lines—whether in relation to population growth or in other situations—is simply to remember that curves naturally come in lots of different shapes. Many aspects of the world are best represented by curves shaped like an S, or a slide, or a hump, and not by a straight line. Here are some examples, each showing how a particular aspect of life changes as we move across the four income levels.

Straight lines are much less common than we tend to think, but some lines are straight. Below is a simplified version of the wealth and health chart you have seen before. Instead of all the bubbles, we can draw a line where most of the bubbles are. Some bubbles are above the line and others are below but you can see that in general they cluster around a straight line.