Once again I am grateful for Duncan Green’s excellent blog “From Poverty to Power” for raising the issue of global population growth, which generated a lively debate when I blogged about it earlier this year. This time Green references a fascinating lecture by Hans Rosling. You can watch the video below, in which Rosling uses plastic storage boxes from Ikea (Rosling is Swedish so I suppose this makes sense) and an animated PowerPoint presentation to show how helping with basic needs reduces child mortality and encourages people to have fewer children. His basic message: If you want to address population growth, work on eradicating poverty. It’s a clear-eyed analysis of the population issue and basic development, all in about 10 minutes: