GATES: Well, the most exciting thing I learned when I was just getting into philanthropy was that, if you reduce childhood deaths, if you improve health in a society, that, surprisingly, population growth goes down. And that's because a parent needs to have some children survive into adulthood to take care of them when they're old.
And so, if they think having six children is what they need to do to have at least two survive, that's what they'll do. And amazingly, across the entire world, as health improves, then the population growth actually is reduced.
And there's a miracle intervention, which is vaccines. In 1960, over 20 million children died. In 2005, less than 10 million died. And that's despite much larger global population.
That is huge progress. And a lot of that is because these vaccinations are being given broadly, over half of that improvement. Another part is from economic development.
And so, even in the poorest countries, we should go in and give them a malaria vaccine, and give them vaccines for diarrheal diseases. And if a mother wants to limit her family size, give her the tools that let her have that possibility.
So, I think we owe it even to the poorest billion to give them a chance.
That's not to say I agree with his population growth bit, or even that his apparently somewhat paradoxical reasoning works out if you run the numbers, but it seems that his motivation to improve people's lives is good, whether or not a larger anti-population-growth rationale makes any sense.
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