The population of the world is expected to peak at around 11 billion people before starting to fall, and it may not ever get to such dangerously high levels again.

This startling prediction goes against all popular expectations of continuing exponential increase leading to disaster, but Hans Rosling, the Swedish superstar professor and macro-statistician refused to be called an optimist when he made this statement.

“I am not just thinking optimistically. I base my view on facts. The whole idea that you can use emotions when you look at the world is wrong. My emotions are in the bedroom, and when I look at the world I think and observe, so my conclusions are based on knowledge,” he told Weekend Review on a recent visit to Abu Dhabi.

He explained that a profound shift in the way parents from all over the world think about their children has led to a global preference for smaller families, even in the poorest countries where only a few decades ago having more children was seen as essential insurance against illness and loss.

He quoted a Bangladeshi mother who was determined to have a small family because she and her husband would be able to focus on their two children and give them better education and a better future, rather than struggling to bring up 5 or 6 children with only modest prospects.

“The biggest change in our time is the fall in the average number of babies born per woman. In 1800 this was 5.9 babies per woman, and 150 years later it was still high at around 5 per woman in 1965, but by 2000 it had plunged to 2.2 babies per woman. It may go as low as 1.5 but is then going to settle at around 2.0,” said Rosling.

“What has already happened must cause the global population to peak, and then start falling,” said the statistician. He quoted the case of China were the current birth rate is 1.6 children per woman (despite the state’s former one-child policy) whereas in Taiwan (by people’s free will) the rate has fallen to one child per woman.

Rosling was speaking at the Arqaam Capital Investor Conference 2015 which brought together more than 300 delegates from 70 corporations from Africa and the Middle East, and 80 global investors. When introducing Rosling, Tariq Lutfi, the Managing Director of Capital Markets at Arqaam, a specialist emerging markets investment bank, spoke enthusiastically of the investment opportunities in the Middle East and Africa region, emphasising the way that GCC investors are looking at Africa for new growth.

Lutfi’s encouraging view was matched later in Rosling’s talk with an intriguing mix of statistical analysis and anecdotal data, which is how Rosling has become such a hit speaker on TV and at conferences all over the world. While the numbers give the big picture of what is happening at a national and global level, the key to the human impact of the numbers comes from the anecdotal accounts of how the improvements affected people, backed by a continuous series of polls and public research which fill in the gaps left by the global statistics.

Balance of love

“Across the world we are taking better care of fewer children,” Rosling told Weekend Review. “As mothers and fathers, as relatives, and as communities, we have chosen to offer better condition to our children rather than play a numbers game on survival. We have changed from seeking a balance of death to a balance of love.”

The question is whether the future 11 billion people will be prosperous and stable in their lives. Rosling’s data is available at his fascinating website www.gapminder.org which shows an almost universal improvement in living standards and household wealth across all continents, and he is convinced that the numbers will steadily get better.

His data showed the huge impact that quite simple improvements can offer people’s lives. He pointed to how ownership of a simple item such as a wheel barrow has made huge differences to the productivity of subsistence farmers. Using a wheel barrow they were suddenly able to move five to six times as many sacks of produce or cans of water at one time when compared to carrying them by hand or on their heads.

Rosling’s point was that such a small addition to a family’s assets can be a real tipping point on the road to escape the hopelessness of grinding poverty, and start a family on the process of finding enough time and money to allow the children to get basic education such as being able read, or make some small investments so that they move into the cash economy and away from simple survival.

But Rosling agrees that all this good news does not make a happy ending certain. There are five major risks which might knock this hopeful trajectory of human development off track, which Rosling listed in no particular order: a major war which might emerge from a regular conflict that turns into a big war; climate and environmental change including drought and water shortages, and dramatic changes in the sea; the effects of extreme poverty such as that which helped create the pirates in Somalia or Boko Haram in Nigeria; financial instability such as the recent crash of 2009 which might not have been handled so well and might well have had much more serious effects.

Rosling’s fifth disaster is the Black Swan, the unexpected event that no one has thought of and for which we are totally unprepared. Rosling postulated that such a Black Swan might be spelt “Donald Trump”, or might include a massive epidemic such as Ebola might so easily have become (see Fighting Ebola in Liberia).

Part of Rosling’s mission is to fight public ignorance of these globally hopeful developments which is largely conditioned by prejudice and long-held popular suppositions.

He illustrated this by asking people in Europe and America what percentage of the world’s population they thought was literate. More than 80 per cent of the respondents got it wrong by guessing that global literacy was somewhere between 40 to 60 per cent of the human race. In fact, the right answer is 80 per cent of the world’s people can read and write, but only 8 per cent of the respondents got it right.

UAE visitor

Rosling sees the UAE as being at the geographic centre of the future dominant populations of Africa and Asia which he foresees peaking at about 4 billion each, while Europe and the Americas will only have between one to two billion each.

“The UAE will be the hub of the world in time and it is following the right strategy to work so hard for its population to be educated and trained to take on this role,” said Rosling.

Rosling has been a frequent visitor the UAE and mentioned two friends in the UAE as particularly inspiring through their optimism and dedication to education, and their hard work in building a secure future for their country through solid and long-lasting human development.

The first was Shaikh Nahyan Bin Mubarak Al Nahyan, Minister of Culture and Youth, who Rosling met in 1999 during his first visit to the UAE. He said that they enjoyed a long conversation about the challenges in overcoming the very rapid development of the UAE’s education as it moved from small classes learning to read and write sitting on the sand, to setting up and running universities teaching the whole range of subjects. In addition, Rosling commended Shaikh Nahyan’s foresight in working to preserve the gender balance in the UAE’s universities as more and more women entered university, which led him to encourage more men to take degrees to avoid the growing gender gap.

The second friend was Dr Rufia Ghobash who had been President of the Arabian Gulf University in Bahrain and had come back to Dubai and founded the Women’s Museum which Rosling described as absolutely brilliant.

He described how he had invited her to speak in Stockholm where she lectured on psychiatric epidemiology showing the gender differences in depression, focusing on the problems that women who are not educated but living in the modern sector had the greatest problems, compared to others living in more traditional sectors while the least depressed were those who were both educated and living the modern sector.

Rosling described these two individuals, one from the political and one from the academic arena, as part of the enormous human pillar that Rosling encounters all over the world and is so inspiring by working to support development and opportunity.

Here are two examples of Rosling’s numbers at work: income per person vs life expectancy and children per woman vs life expectancy