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er_seen. I It's a natural concern. It just seems like common sense that if more children survive, the global population will go up faster. In fact, I used to worry about this problem myself. But I was wrong. The answer is, emphatically and without a doubt, no--lower rates of child mortality do not lead to overpopulation. The best explanation of why this is true was given by my friend Hans Rosling, whose influence on me is evident by the number of times I mention him in this book. I first became aware of Hans when he gave an unforgettable TED talk in 2006 called "The Best Stats You've Ever Seen."* Hans had spent decades working in public health, with a focus on poor countries, and he used his talk to share some surprising facts about how health was getting better. Eventually, I got to meet Hans and spend a lot of time with him. I admired the way he showed people that the countries with the highest child mortality rates--places like Somalia, Chad, Central African Republic, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and Mali--are also the countries where women have the most children.9 When the child mortality rate drops, so does the size of the average family. It happened in France in the 1700s, Germany in the late 1800s, and in Southeast Asia and Latin America in the second half of the twentieth century.10 There are various reasons that explain why this is the case; one factor is that parents tend to want enough children so that they'll have someone to take care of them when they're older. If the odds are high that some of their children won't survive to adulthood, they'll make the perfectly rational decision to have more kids. * It's at https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen. I promise that you won't regret watching it.