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”.
What would you like to learn about today?
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