I wonder if Rosling’s conclusions are confounded. The human and environmental systems in which we swim are complex, not simple. Education being the key driver of population numbers strikes me as overly simple.
He has presented hours of thoughts on data spanning multiple decades from countries across the globe and comments identified correlations.
Education being highly correlated with reduced population growth is a data confirmed observation, and not a declaration of prime causation.
But then wonders what the drivers are.