Hans Rosling and the Joy of Stats

In 2010, the BBC produced a highly entertaining and informative documentary – The Joy of Stats (link here) with renowned world health expert and infectiously enthusiastic Hans Rosling.  Rosling is the founder of Gapminder, a nonprofit organization that provides amazing tools for visualizing data among other things.  Rosling’s fantastic TED talk (see here), which uses some of the tools, is a must see.  It will change the way you look at the world.  This link points to a panel discussion at the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting 2011.  A transcript can be found here.  In it, Rosling shows convincing evidence that the world population will peak out at about 9 billion because we have reached “peak child” – the number of children in the world below 15 is 2 billion and it is not growing.  He argues that women the world over are choosing to have fewer children.  The developing world is also getting healthier but they can’t afford all treatments; what the world needs is a new way to develop cheaper medical treatments.