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And what we said, my mother and me, "Thank you industrialization. Thank you steel mill. Thank you power station. And thank you chemical processing industry that gave us time to read books."

IIRC that talk had a powerful ending (beside that quote).

Are you referring to the one where he performs sword eating? (I kid you not)

There goes my weekend! Thank you so much.

He's worth following on Twitter, too, if that's your thing. His tweets are mostly information and graphs, not noise.

https://twitter.com/HansRosling

Is there a tl:dr of the video?

Don't worry, be happy.

Me? I'm worrying.

tl;dr the world is developing and getting richer, and a natural consequence of that is declining fertility (birth) rates, preventing the runaway population "bomb" that so many people have feared.

s/natural/statistically correlated/

There are a number of countries getting wealthier which don't have falling birth rates. Most are oil exporting.

Tom "Do the Math" Murphy discusses this: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2013/09/the-real-populat...

Qatar, UAE, Kuwait, and Bahrain, especially.

Bill Gates, good friend of Roslings, is far more candid in private than his public appearances and shareholders letters reveal:

Appearing in The London Times in May, 2009, now only available through The Internet Archive:

"Billionaire club in bid to curb overpopulation"

http://web.archive.org/web/20100106010617/http://www.timeson...

"Patricia Stonesifer, former chief executive of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which gives more than £2 billion a year to good causes, attended the Rockefeller summit. She said the billionaires met to “discuss how to increase giving” and they intended to “continue the dialogue” over the next few months.

"Another guest said there was “nothing as crude as a vote” but a consensus emerged that they would back a strategy in which population growth would be tackled as a potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat.

"'This is something so nightmarish that everyone in this group agreed it needs big-brain answers,' said the guest. 'They need to be independent of government agencies, which are unable to head off the disaster we all see looming.'"

Emphasis added.

More on this by me: http://redd.it/237yxs

Bill and Melinda Gates are abortion ideologues, in fact the biggest private funders of abortion in the world (at least $117 million in direct funding, cf. http://www.lifenews.com/2014/06/16/gates-foundation-gave-117...). Bill's father was apparently a bigshot in Planned Parenthood. One has to wonder if they really support abortion because they perceive a population problem, or if it isn't the other way around.

How exactly does one become an abortion ideologue? I do know of anti-abortion ideologues.

Providing access to birth control so women can take more control over their lives, and in the process providing health and economic stability should be lauded. That is the reason most sane people support the work of Bill and Melinda Gates.

I have no beef with abortions. I believe they should be readily accessible and women should have the choice. If Bill and Melinda Gates think the same then I can't mark it against them. I've never met anyone who was in support of the ProChoice argument and saw it as a way to control population growth. That is simply ridiculous.

China?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_China

Or how about this paper on the role of abortion in population control

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3709011

No nation desirous of reducing its growth rate to 1% or less can expect to do so without the widespread use of abortion. This observational study, based on the experience of 116 of the world's largest countries, supports the contention that abortion is essential to any national population growth control effort. The principal findings are: Except for a few countries with ageing populations and very high contraceptive prevalence rates, developed countries will need to maintain abortion rates generally in the range of 201-500 abortions per 1000 live births if they are to maintain growth rates at levels below 1%.

You've basically conflated what an independent NGO provides as a choice to what a government enforces as a policy. No point in debating things now. I'll leave.

Abortion itself isn't a particularly good direct way to control population, and there are others which are just as effective which have been used traditionally in many cultures: infanticide.

That said, a number of people with a strong expressed interest in population control, for example, the Ehrlichs, include family planning, but not forced methods of population control (e.g., forced abortions or sterilization) among the methods they advocate. See for example One With Nineveh.

Ehrlich does note on page 189:

"By the mid-twentieth century, abortions were being performed legally in some other [non-US] parts of the world. In the SovietUnion and eastern Europe, contraceptives were often unreliable and usually unavailable, so abortion was the primary means of birth control."

A few paragraphs later:

"Abortion is a difficult issue for most peopple, and most people would prefer to see safe and effective contraception widely available to, and used by, all sexually active individuals. If this were to happen, the abortion controversy, perhaps the* biggest source of ethical dispute in our society today, could go away."

His primary focus though is addressed in the following section: "Influencing Reproduction Decisions", largely via education, incentive policies, and family planning services, principally other than abortion.

How about current Supreme Court associate justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg? In a 2009 NYT piece she said, "Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of."

Melinda Gates is a Catholic and for years the Gates Foundation explicitly did not fund abortions for this reason. It took years of involvement with development work and exposure to the lives of women in the poor world for her to move from "absolutely against" to her current position of ambivalent support. Note that Gates Foundation money is still not permitted to be earmarked to fund abortions, but they will now fund organisations that work on contraception and reproductive health even if those organisations also carry out abortions.

I neither know nor care whether they are the world's largest funders of abortion, although that link only says that they gave money to Planned Parenthood for work other than abortions.

I'm not even going to try and parse your last sentence.

They have always explicitly funded abortions, giving tens of millions of dollars directly to abortionists, and making very little effort to convincingly lie about it. Money is fungible. If you put money into one bank account, and I pay a bill with my other bank account, you have still funded my activity. Every ten-year-old knows this, which is why they are not only lying but also insulting us with such a poor lie.

By the way, Planned Parenthood does abortions "in house", so it's not like they have any budget line items for "abortion" anyway. Unless they're doing activity-based costing, their budget is for things like [abortion] advertising, [abortion] lobbying, [abortion] facilities, [abortion] equipment, [abortionists] salaries, etc. Melinda Gates could conceivably fund their entire budget while claiming shamelessly that the funds were "not for abortion" and "earmarked for other expenditures".

"millions of dollars directly to abortionists, and making very little effort to convincingly lie about it." Good, then you shouldn't have too much trouble getting a reliable source to confirm that, right? Right?

See the link a few steps above. $117 million to Planned Parenthood and Marie Stopes International over the past few years.

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