Will Saving Poor Children Lead to Overpopulation?

Professor Hans Rosling is something of an internet legend. A professor of global health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, he is perhaps best known for his Ted talks that dispel common myths about the developing world, using huge quantities of public-data presented in an appealing and eye-opening fashion.

He also makes videos through the Gapminder Foundation, a non-profit venture he started with family members to promote “sustainable global development and achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals by increased use and understanding of statistics and other information.” They describe themselves as a modern online-museum helping make the world understandable.

In this video, Professor Rosling, does a simple yet appealing presentation to camera, using props for graphs instead of animated graphics, to dispel the common myth that improving child mortality will lead to overpopulation.

Simply yet nicely photographed, Professor Rosling appears here all-in-white, against a white background, and using a white table. Only his face and the props (of graphs and population) have any colour, drawing the eye throughout.

It’s an interesting technique using props here. Graphics would have been the obvious choice but I think the tactile nature of the props give the statistics a nice weighty feel. It would be interesting to know if they did this intentionally or they simply did not have the resources for fancy graphics. Either way, the result is very effective and this short video explains the concept very clearly of why better child health outcomes lead to smaller family sizes.

Of course the main star of Professor Rosling’s videos is Professor Rosling. This one with him alone in a quiet studio, while very effective in presentation, arguably does not do justice to how entertaining his professorial persona is… that is far more evident in front of an audience, such as in his many popular Ted talks.

I will feature more of Han’s Rosling’s videos in future blogs, but in the meantime I’d strongly recommend looking him up at Gapminder and Ted.