Hans Rosling: Stats that reshape your world-view

http://www.ted.com With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, statistics guru Hans Rosling uses an amazing new presentation tool, Gapminder, to present data that debunks several myths about world development. Rosling is professor of international health at Sweden's Karolinska Institute, and founder of Gapminder, a nonprofit that brings vital global data to life. (Recorded February 2006 in Monterey, CA.)

TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Closed captions and translated subtitles in a variety of languages are now available on TED.com, at http://www.ted.com/translate.

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• Category

  News & Politics

[marianopicco]

TED go to your archives and re-upload this in HD please ... can't believe not a million people seen this, and gangnam style goes into the billions. 

[jp L]

He's pretty smart, euh?

[bitsky2000]

I responded pretty much because I was in a mood. I honestly didn't think that there any thought behind your comment, but I'm happily proven wrong.

FWIW, I think it is valid and important to question the economic-growth-at-all-costs model that has led to, and also ignores, serious global problems. In general, economic prosperity leads to other types of prosperity--better health outcomes being one example--but that doesn't make it right.

Rage on!

[amalekited]

I wonder who is it that gives honest replies to comments like mine? ...In any case, I said "who gives a fuck" in a moment of exasperation and only in reference to the subject matter Hans used in his illustration, not his main thrust of data-driven judgment making.

It could be worded more eloquently, but I feel the same: who gives a fuck about the relentless scramble for economic "progress" with much more pressing problems facing our generation.

[bitsky2000]

This is a difficult question to answer authoritatively. Besides myself, who I can say is certainly giving of fuck, as it were, I would say that any of a number of people living in aforementioned countries probably care. You might be a "troll," but I don't know you, so to classify you as such might cause you to "give a fuck" about an inaccurate label. It does little good to classify units into groups if the classification doesn't match reality. I hope that helps.

[bitsky2000]

I think that we essentially agree, especially with the main point that data is important to understanding the way that the larger world actually is. Besides, it is perfectly fine to have more than one take-home message.

[RedMinx29]

Except that the beliefs he is debunking are not unsubstantiated; there was a time when they were true. The changing graphs show us how that has changed, but nevertheless they were true at some point in the past. Otherwise I absolutely agree with you, we should be paying attention to the data rather than blindly holding on to beliefs, and making it, not just available, but easily understandable to the general public.

[bitsky2000]

Actually, I would say that the take home message is that data trumps unsubstantiated belief, and therefore data should be freely available to everyone. The info about the "third world" was used as an illustration.

[TheBotBob]

Here's a presentation on the impact of properly observing data. Ironically the camera focuses on the face and hands of the presenter, and switches rapidly between views. All the information was in the contextual presentation of data, which this video almost entirely missed. Great presentation, incredibly poor film.

[TheAtheologian]

I think he also makes clear a method for removing these misconceptions, namely the availability of data. If people can have the data, as we have just seen, they would radically change their opinions, so letting this information out would be extraordinarily useful.

I am personally always biased in favour of releasing data, so unsurprisingly I was most entranced by this message.

[sagatangden]

His accent is sooo typically Swedish :')

[sn3192]

wow, and this is from way back in 07? and i'm seeing it in 13!

i wonder if the stats did indeed shift just as he'd predicted in the last few years

definitely a lot more people should see this