When I think of the changes that have happened in my lifetime, I often think of television, jet planes, computers, the Internet and electric cars. These are the things that have affected my life the most. However, when we think about how others’ lives have changed in the last 70 years, there are more important topics to think about. For example, what is the life expectancy of people living in India? How many children are vaccinated against common childhood diseases, such as measles? How have these figures changed in your lifetime and in mine?
I first came across Hans Rosling (1948-2017) a Swedish statistician and doctor, when I was teaching high-school English in Norway. He has made several videos that help explain how inadequate our view of living conditions in other countries is. I think the most important thing I have learned from watching his videos is that we have come a long way in solving some of the largest problems in the world. His statistics encourage optimism that we can make the world a better place.
Gapminder was founded in Stockholm in 2005 by Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund, and Hans Rosling. They developed interesting ways to visualize statistics and make it easier to understand the statistics and how they have changed over the years. Gapminder is an independent Swedish foundation with no political, religious, or economic affiliations.
This video illustrates how we often get the facts wrong. The link is to a Gapminder video and a TedTalk from 2014 held in Berlin: How not to be ignorant about the world, is about 19 minutes and features both Hans Rosling and Ola Rosling. Please note that this video is now almost 10 years old, so the numbers will have changed and things will have improved even more since then.
Another example: the book I wrote about last, Limitarianism, was concerned about the differences between the rich and the poor, but what is your understanding about how many rich there really are in the world. Look at this short video at the Gapminder website and see how Hans Rosling explains it. I find that he is very good at explaining things that we might not have understood correctly. Had you understood that most people have an income in the middle range? There are some extremely poor, and some extremely rich, but most aren’t.
Gapminder’s mission is to “fight devastating ignorance with a fact-based world view everyone can understand.”
Now look at a third video about how income relates to life expectancy and enjoy the bubble diagrams that Gapminder is known for.
Gapminder’s Projects
Gapminder has three main projects. The first one (“Find your misconceptions”) is to help educate people so that their knowledge is kept up-to-date. If you are reading this, you have lived a few years and things have changed since you went to school. Depending on your age and how long it is since you went to school, your knowledge about the world may be out of date.
Their second main project (“Understand a changing world”) show how the numbers have changed over time. In general, things improve. Humans are good at making things better.
Their third main project (“See the reality behind the data”) or “Dollar Street” is a large collection of pictures to show what the terms extreme poverty and poverty mean and what the differences are. We often understand things better with pictures.
Using their three projects, I would like to encourage you to explore the Gapminder.org website. I especially recommend looking at “Dollar Street”.
After not writing a blog for a long time, I have decided that I would like to share some of the things that I have been reading about, as I am concerned about the state of the world. This is something that I have always been interested in, especially since I first studied economics in my early 20s. Over the years since then, that is, over about 50 years, I have read various books and articles about the state of the world. I still have this interest and I would like to share some of the things that I have learned.
This blog is primarily about the book pictured below. As with many books, the author covers a limited topic and one must remember that the world we live in is complex. Many problems in the world have been solved and in later blogs I will come back to some of the things that we have actually managed. We must not be pessimistic, but we must also be aware of what problems there still are to solve. We must take ideas from many authors and researchers and put them together into our own view of the world, which is also influenced by where we live, how we have earned our living, the people we have known and what sort of childhood we had. I am currently retired, in my 70s, and was a high-school teacher for over 30 years. I have lived in Norway since 1980, but grew up in Vancouver, BC, Canada.
I would like to recommend this book which explains one of the problems that we are facing in the world today. I found the prose easy to read. There was some jargon, but not so much that I couldn’t understand what the author was getting at. Ingrid Robeyns lives and works in the Netherlands and works at the Utrecht University. She is concerned about inequality and injustice in the world. Her training is in philosophy and economics and in 2012 she decided to work on answering the question: “Can a person be too rich?” This book, a result of her research, was published in 2024 by Allen Lane (Penguin Books) and has been dedicated “To all activists who are fighting against injustice”.
The concept of limitarianism is that nobody needs an excessive income or to accumulate excessive wealth. When one is poor, getting a higher income improves one’s standard of living, but when one is wealthy, a higher income doesn’t really change one’s lifestyle at all. The author discusses how limiting extreme wealth is both a moral issue and an economic issue. She quite realizes that this idea is not easy to put into practice, but she would like people to become more aware of how this idea of limiting wealth would help everyone.
I agree with the author that inequality in the world has been increasing, as the poor stay poor, but the rich get richer and richer. Extreme poverty in the world has decreased in recent decades, but in relatively well-off countries, such as Norway where I live, there is still a proportion of the population where people do not have enough income to meet basic needs, including having sufficient food to eat. Local governments do not get enough income to pay for the services that they are expected to provide. Public investment in infrastructure, such as schools, healthcare and transportation are under-funded. And yet, the rich amass huge amounts of money and then feel that they have to store their money in tax havens and even move out of Norway to countries where they feel that their wealth is treated better, that is, not taxed as much. Why do they not want to contribute to the country that has helped them amass their wealth?
What is it that Ingrid Robeyns is really trying to promote in her book? She feels that there are too many super-rich people, that either avoid taxation or evade taxation, so that governments have less money than they need to provide the services to their population so that everyone can have a reasonable life. There should not only be a minimum wage, but there should also be a maximum wage. In addition, neither individuals, companies nor institutions should be allowed to accumulate extreme wealth. Wealth over a certain limit should be returned to the country in which it was “earned”.
In the last chapter, the author includes several ideas about what could be done, but also realizes that her suggestion of limiting people’s wealth is not something that will be accomplished easily or within a few years. However, it is something that activists should be working towards.
This book is meant to make you think about your own place in the world, and also about the people who live in the world with you. Will you make any changes in your life? What? When? This is highly individual. Below is a summary of the 10 chapters in the book.
Chapter 1 How Much is Too Much?
The author discusses her reasons for the limits that she suggests.
Chapter 2 It’s Keeping the Poor in Poverty While Inequality Grows
When the super-rich, the upper 1% or 0.1% of society do not share their wealth, it means that the distance between the rich and the poor increases. Because the rich don’t mix with the poor, the rich don’t understand the problems that the poor face. I feel that too many politicians, those who are making the rules and policies that we live under, have no understanding of what it means to not have enough. There are many authors who have written about inequality, but Ingrid Robeyns tries to show the reader about what happens to the top group.
Chapter 3 It’s Dirty Money
Not all wealth has been created by honest labor. Much inherited wealth was generated centuries ago based on slave labor. Some wealth is stolen, such as leaders in countries that steal the income generated from the country’s natural resources that belong to all in the country. Some wealth is created from criminal activities. The author gives some interesting examples of how wealth is generated or actually stolen from the poor.
Chapter 4 It’s Undermining Democracy
Having money means having power, both economically and politically. The wealthy have been undermining democracy by getting the rules changed to favor themselves. This is a serious problem in many countries where only the wealthy end up with the political jobs of making the laws in a country and administering these laws.
Chapter 5 It’s Setting the World on Fire
Climate change and global warming are being worsened by the super-rich who are not concerned about anyone but themselves. They can survive the changes and it is the poor who suffer the most. The author explains how the super-rich are contributing more than their share to this particular problem.
Chapter 6 Nobody Deserves to be a Multimillionaire
Personally, I think everyone deserves to have three decent meals a day, but I have to agree with the author that being a multimillionaire is not something that anyone “deserves” or has earned. Usually the super-rich have underpaid the people that work for them. In my opinion, the workers in any company “deserve” decent wages and living conditions.
Chapter 7 There’s So Much We Can Do with the Money
When the super-rich don’t pay their fair share of the taxes, then that money is not available to keep the infrastructure in a country in good health. Think of education, highways, healthcare and a lot more that governments provide for their country.
Chapter 8 Philanthropy is Not the Answer
There are rich people that share their wealth after they have spent years accumulating it. But letting the rich decide where their “extra” money should go, does not necessarily mean that the money gets used wisely. This chapter gives some examples of what happens, and also what doesn’t happen.
Chapter 9 The Rich will Benefit, Too
Being rich does not make people happy. Having less, may let them have a better life. The author is particularly concerned about children who grow up with rich parents, but are starved of the things that matter to children, including love and attention.
Chapter 10 The Road Ahead
Here Ingrid Robeyns comes with lots of suggestions on what can be done to make limitarianism more feasible and how it can be combined with other ideas to make the world a better place for everyone to live in.
I hope I have encouraged you to read this book, but even if you don’t, I hope my comments have made you think.
