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Hans Rosling: Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you’ve ever seen
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i wish my stats instructor were like him!
The amazing power of data… This video shows the power of proper data analysis. More of this needs to be done, and I hope that the world takes his small, but very true, comment in mind. The 100$ computer is key to this success. It’s out there and needs to be made popular.
Great presentation. Very compelling.
As with Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”, it’s really compelling, assuming the data is correct.
Using that assumption, though, the presentation is wonderfully done,
I am elated to know the facts about developing countries, particularly India. Thanks Ted !!! You did us a wonderful job by helping us feel proud.
What an eye opener!!
I never had a Stats Instructor, and wish mine was like him. Fascinating information delivered by a fascinating individual.
my stats prof was as boring as the numbers were. I wish he’s my stats prof… i’ll get a better grades…
An exciting statistician… who’d've thunk it
Absolutely amazing presentation. If all professors could make their fields this fascinating, we would all be thrilled to learn more.
Hans has an update
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/140
This was the most informative 20 minutes I have spent in as long as I can remember.
excellent. been seeing lots of great stuff from TED lately.
It is not a coincidence that Africa is consistently left behind. Neither is it the fault of the Africans.
Hans has done an excellent job. Wish I could download this presentation and show it to people all over India. If anyone knows how to download or if hans can allow me a copy, I’d be forever grateful.
Yes you can. Go here:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/92
Great presentation.
tajikistan is not in eastern europe and
yemen is not a neighbor to the emirates.
mauritius is anything, but no typical african land. and who scares whom most, china the us ore the other way, that will be unanswered.
everyone can make out of statistics what he wants. maybe thats why they are not used that much. shure, the differences between the countries are getting smaller.
but like an good german singer once sang:
“the borders are not between you and me,
neither between east and west nor between there and here.
the borders are between up and down and all know this is true. and that is a reason for fighting, though it ever has been so”
“Die Grenze verläuft nicht zwischen mir und zwischen dir.
Nicht zwischen Ost und West, nicht zwischen da oder hier.
Sie verläuft zwischen oben und unten und das ist auch jedem klar.
Und das is n Grund zum kämpfen, obwohl’s immer schon so war!
Und das is n Grund zum kämpfen, obwohl’s immer schon so war!”
(Quetschenpaule)
and like an old native once said:
“only when the last tree is cut, only when the last river is polluted, only when the last fish is caught, will they realise that you can’t eat money”
so get the **** rid of this material thinking!
Amazing and fascinating. Thanks!
As a frequent traveller to Africa, I always get suprised when people assume that everyone is poor and lives in a mud hut. In reality, the situation is much different and these statistics show that in a format that is easily understood.
Hats off to your work Hans and the vision that is so obviously behind it. Linking the data and designers is a phenomenal idea and I just love it.
It’s sheer genius isn’t it?!? An almost perfect presentation!
I use that – and other examples like it – to show what happens when you’re on top of your technology rather than using things like PowerPoint when it’s on top of you (bad turn of phrase, but you know what I mean, I’m sure).
Mind you – it must have taken him bloody ages to write the presentation as that software looks pretty bespoke to me (and I speak not only as a presentation skills trainer but as someone with 20+ years experience as a University Researcher doing exactly the same sort of things as he’s doing!)
Does anyone know the software he is using to animate the graphs? Very very powerful stuff, the animation really helps.
You have a beta version here available :
http://tools.google.com/gapminder/
You can use it online and select some countries to follow their evolution…
for the most part this presentation was effective and powerful. however i feel that it is problematic to say that there is no longer a gap between the rich and poor while using a scale that makes the distance between $1 and $10, the same as the distance between $10 and $100 (income per day). I would be highly curious to see what the two humps looked like on a graph in which the distance between 10-100 was 9 times longer than that between 1-10. If not careful such visual information can perpetuate (or create new) incorrect assumptions about the world.
barring an “act of god” and assuming that his stats are correct,the world as a whole will improve. This should also show China that democracy is beneficial to life. Why are we not utilizing this data to our benefit.
yes the world is improving. Or at least the lives and buying power of the majority of peoples in the world. But at what cost? Every product requires energy to form, whether shoes, 100$ computer, or medicine. The world is a runaway train driven by wealth. The question is when and where will it crash? Great presentation.
i dont know which software he used for the presentation, but i know a great software which does the job, and it is free.
you can check: http://www.businessobjects.com/jump/cxnow/
That’s fine, but don’t get statistics (the course and the math) confused with statistics (the data). He isn’t doing any actual math here! But the programming is killer.
The scales are logarithmic, which is quite misleading
Yes, it’s a log scale for the daily income, which I agree can be misleading. So the person who asked about the gap between 10 and 100 should possibly be 9 times bigger than the gap between 1 and 10, that is not correct. Since it’s a log scale, the distance between 1 and 10 is 10 and the distance between 10 and 100 is 10. Log is not the same as decimal. If you have a decimal, say 100, and convert it to a log, the log number would be 2 (I think, it’s been awhile since I’ve used a log scale). Your math professor might be able to explain it better, but bascially his log scale is correct (proportionate wise).
I think kd19 is right pointing out the scale detail, however I think Prof. Rosling intention was rather pointing out the evolution of the emerging countries and how “olsfashioned” are our conceptions about the world.
Maybe I’m off bat a little here, but, I thought the presentation software was neat but not neat enough to be bothered commenting on… looked kinda dated in fact.
The lecture itself was very interesting however.
Nice post.
Great find. If all stats presentations were this effective, more people would have a clue.
Thanks for posting it!
I could listen to this prof for hours and not get bored. Even though his success is heavily based on the media show his chrystal clear views represent advertisement at its best for statistic sciences.
Taking inflation into account, the people he’s talking about are actually worse off now & effectively earning LESS than they were 35 years ago.
The rich are getting richer, the poor poorer. He doesn’t show the % of rich/poor people in poor countries. He mentions around 20% for the West but nothing for the 3rd World. He then shows a graph showing how the 3rd World economies are catching us up. What he doesn’t show you is that it’s only the richest 3% in the 3rd World that have enabled them to catch up. For the other 97% they are just as bad off as they have always been. His graphs shows what he wants to show and meaningless to the average 3rd World citizen. Statistics are easily manipulated & can be made to make whatever point you want to make.
Billions of people starving, dying and living in poverty in the World and no statistics can hide the fact. Corporations and governments pay people like this guy to make you feel better.
Unlike this guy you can make a difference. Donate some of your small change to a charity. Make a difference, not hot air.
“It’s as if the world is flattening out” he said at the end. Judging by the comments here a lot of people don’t want to believe that. So what and who cares what you think.
The power to divide and conquer based on class warfare is fast disappearing. With it the last vestiges of aristocracy will finally be destroyed when the elitists have no one left with which they can falsely claim stewardship. Your serfs don’t need or want your protection anymore.
Let’s not destroy ourselves with nationalist hatred between countries and partisan hatred within before we reach this plateau of national equality. A flat world would be a nice change for once.
I have about 11 of the talks given there, Robinson is really very good as well and then the others, well one cannot leave one out …
Cool graphics, but stat on infant mortality is off-different countries count a baby as “born” at different ages, so that if an infant dies at 2 months in US=infant mortality, but in other countries this baby wouldn’t be counted-makes me wonder about the other stats-but very dynamic speaker, way cool graphics
WOW!
So the world is flat afterall?
Awesome presentation. Loved it.
I only wish more people had access to gifted thinkers like him…. not access even, just the knowledge that they are out there. Fabulous.
I must say I respect BMW more for getting involved in projects like this; especially since they waited till the end of the presentation to put out their ad.
The gap between 1 and 100 is 10 times the gap between 1 and 10. BUT, on a log scale, the gap between 1 and 100 APPEARS to be only TWICE the gap between 1 and 10. Using a log scale to support the claim that there’s not a huge gap or that it’s not increasing is blatant manipulation of the masses who are not accustomed to thinking in log-scales and it’s totally inappropriate in this context. Furthermore, the points that Frank Smith made are right on. Charisma and entertaining graphics aside, this is a shamefully misleading representation of data, accompanied by some conspicuous gaps (inflation and distribution of wealth within countries).
I am amazed at the naysayers with no information to base their opinions on. The guy obviously spent a lot of time on this and only had 20 minutes. To parse this the way some of the writers have may be unfair. He only had 20 minutes to present. He could not have the time to explainhow these numbers were arrived at. Dead babies are dead babies More money this year is more money, stupid. Inflation is different in every country. I see a lot of jealousy here, shame on you. Go to work.
can someone tell me more about the 100$ Computer????
There are 2 fundamental problems with his entire analysis, and they concern using nation-states as the unit of analysis for understanding historical change:
1. The ‘bubbles’ obscure inequalities within each nation-state, i.e. that inequality can, and usually does, grow at the same time as wealth accumulation happens. So a country that seems to be doing well as a totality may very well contain within extreme gaps between prosperity and poverty. This happens even at a city-level (why is the richest congressional district in the US a few subways stops away from the poorest — i.e. the Upper East Side and South Bronx?)
2. Treating nation-states as isolated units obscures the history of a global economy that made the wealth of some nations predicated on the exploitation of others. This has not gone away at all under so-called globalization.
This whole presentation and conference seems to be about a bunch of privileged people patting themselves on the back for being complacent about the state of the world. The whole “the poor will pull themselves up by the bootstraps” discourse is hardly new and reeks of self-satisfaction. The final point about the “importance of culture” and that “seemingly impossible is possible” is the same kind of hooey in that Oprah-club book The Secret, where if you just wish positive things, they will come true. Bah.
He seemed to stay pretty clear of what the personal incomes were for the “growing economies” as the presentation went on. Instead, he focussed on GDP. Which doesn’t really accurately discuss the wealth gap that occurs as third-world economies grow into the industrial megaforce that the end up becoming. No mention of India and China and the conditions of the lowest class labor force. No discussion of the decline of rural Chinese farmer class and their movement into industrialized cities where they face meager wages and are treated like beasts of burden. And as long as the “Western world” demands cheap goods and as long as a steady supply of cheap labor is around in developing countries, the rich will get richer and poor will get stomped.
We’ll see what happens with the one-child rule of China in about 30 years. No mention of that either.
No mention of the ever-widening wealth gap that has grown exponentially over the last 50 years.
Oops. I liked the graphics though!
Mickey Lui, the $100 computer is actually turning into more like the $178 dollar computer.
It has yet to be implemented and its met many road blocks (hardware pricing issues, govt contracts). It is no longer the $100 dream they all wanted it to be. That being said, it’s a noble idea–a hand cranked laptop that is build rugged and only really computes the necessary programs that developing country populations need, initially, to start acclimating them to the world (wide web).
We’ll see what happens.
Adam – that’s exactly what BMW wants you to say… Congratulations, you just got advertised to!
(editors note: Dr. Long Balls drives a Mercedes. But he did not allow himself to be advertised to)
I too was mesmerized by Hans Rosling’s presentation for TED, but I decided to dig deeper. Sadly, a couple minutes of research disillusioned me completely. Though Rosling never mentions it in his presentation, he plots income (per capita GDP) on a log scale. A rich country could be growing twice as fast in income as a poor country, but on a logarithmic plot the “gap” between the two could actually appear to be shrinking. A number of other commenters have already caught and mentioned this. Don’t be fooled into thinking this is a trivial point. It is absolutely vital! Rosling’s graphs are very misleading! MHP, Stanford U