This Glyph Says It All About Population Growth

My son, Greg Weeks (Professor and Chair of Political Science at UNC, Charlotte), is currently in Santiago, Chile, doing a few days of intensive research there. Today he was at CEPAL, which is the population and development wing of the United Nations' Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. Tim Miller, Population Affairs officer at CEPAL (holding an MA in Demography from Berkeley) took Greg up to the roof of the building housing CEPAL, where they have several glyphs (archeological style carved symbols), one of which represents population growth in Latin America. Greg snapped this photo of it:

When you see that, you know exactly what you're looking at. Despite falling fertility throughout the region, improving mortality and a still young age at marriage keep the birth rate higher than the death rate and the population of Latin America is projected to continue to increase over the next few decades, as it has for the past 100 years or so.