Mortality Trends

We read mostly bad news in the newspapers today. Here is a really gratifying chart from The Economist about mortality trends and their decline over the past 40 years.

The decline in mortality is greatest in low income countries, and the gap in mortality between low income and high income countries has shrunk. Yet there's still an obvious gap to be closed there.

It's been shown that high mortality rates, particular among children, lead to high birth rates, so this decline in mortality would seem set to contribute to a plateauing of human population growth.