You’ve never seen data presented like this. With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, statistics guru Hans Rosling debunks myths about the so-called “developing world.”
Even the most worldly and well-traveled among us will have their perspectives shifted by Hans Rosling. A professor of global health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, his current work focuses on dispelling common myths about the so-called developing world, which (he points out) is no longer worlds away from the west. In fact, most of the third world is on the same trajectory toward health and prosperity, and many countries are moving twice as fast as the west did.
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The original source is TED, see URL below. The talk was filmed in Feb-2006, and available on the TED website since Jun-2006.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html
the correlation between income, development and heath, poulation are known by many but not lay it out may be,,, it is no myth by rather another angenda, wake up call to western(?)civilization for lacking behind …
Excellent video.
I think the video’s main value is the message that we often base our arguments or form our thoughts on anecdotal evidence or simply personal perceptions.
The response in comment #2 is in all probability a classic case of such. Pray tell, explain your basis for saying “the correlation between income, development and health are known by many”. Specifically, which metrics you are talking about, what number is “many” and where you get your statistics from to show what you said is true.
Having said that, I would note that Professor Rosling did not make it explicitly clear (he hinted at it) that statistics can lie (depending on how it is gathered). It is important for us to understand what the metrics mean and then properly reason about the trends. You will notice that throughout the video, he tried to correlate trends with what he believed were the causes.
I would encourage people to try the tool at http://www.gapminder.org. Through it, I found out that Singapore’s per-capita CO2 emissions actually caught up with the US in 1994 but there has since been an apparent effort to lower our individual carbon footprint. The emissions are still high (even in absolute terms), which is somewhat worrying, but the fact that we seem to be actively working on the problem gives me hope.
Interesting video. Portraying well-being indicators of each country does get blurred when the data is being lumped in the regional approach. I am glad to learn that life in the developing world has indeed improved since the 1960s but they still have not caught up with the West with regards to buying power. Western countries still hold substantial private sector advantage.