Hans Rosling’s TedTalk “The Best Stats You’ve Ever Seen” Informal Response (09/09/2021)
Rosling’s observation following his comparative survey of the Karolinska students, the Chimpanzees, and the Karolinska faculty was that a lot of the subjects answered the survey questions based on their preconceived ideas about the countries, rather than any actual evidence. The significance of the results from this survey is that there is little social awareness that the western world has of the reality of the lives of those living in third world countries. Data has shown that as these so-called “third world countries” develop, they mirror, or at least approach, the statistics surrounding the typical American and western life, however students and faculty still believe that these countries are severely lagging behind the western world.
Social change preceded economic change in Asia. The social conflict between North and South Vietnam during the Vietnam War ultimately ended in Vietnam abandoning a communist-style economy and adopting a market economy after the two parties conjoined to create a unified Vietnam. From that point on, the economic conditions in Vietnam, and Asia overall, improved leading to massive, positive economic growth due to social changes. The timeline of economic growth in Vietnam is significant because sometimes scientists fail to consider the reasons behind a country’s condition. From a mathematical perspective, a statistician might not realize that the key to improving Vietnam’s economy is to end the Vietnam War and unify North and South Vietnam under a market economy because that is a very historical-political lens. The growth of Vietnam’s economy encourages those involved in human development to deeply consider the reasons why a country is a certain way, and then attempt to find a solution with that context in mind.
According to Rosling’s TedTalk, there is a positive correlation between child mortality and GDP per capita. As GDP per capita increases, child mortality rates improve as well. When a country is more financially well-off, they are able to invest more money into health initiatives, leading to healthier children, and as a result, less child deaths.
As Rosling describes in his talk, the gap between the wealthy and the poor has been closing since 1962. When the spreads of the incomes of the wealthiest and poorest for each country in the world are compiled, there is a lot of overlap, this suggests that the gap is closing with each passing year. Eventually, the global income distribution is predicted to approach the shape of a normal distribution.
Hans Rosling believes that it is imperative that people analyze both the culture and lifestyle of the geographical area (spatial) and how that data has the potential to change over time (temporal). Data is ever changing, and it is also the reasons for that data are very specific to the culture of the area it originates from, so it is important to consider both. The spatial and temporal resolutions relate to the earlier idea about preconceived notions because the students and faculty answered the survey with out-dated ideas about the countries mentioned by Rosling that they still held despite new information being available to them. Also, if you are going to critically approach the problems that are prevalent in a region, you also have to think about why those problems exist. Generalization can be dangerous when it comes to the root of countries’ dilemmas, so if students and faculty at the Karolinska institute were going to be studying how to improve conditions in these countries, it is absolutely necessary that they uncover the actual reasons behind why those conditions exist in the first place, and how they have evolved over time.
Hans Rosling’s work with the Gapminder project is significant to the intersection of human development and data science because it makes overwhelming data from publicly funded research into comprehensible segments through animation of statistics. While Gapminder is not necessarily an analytic outlet for data, it does encourage researchers to make hypotheses based off of the data projections they see, which will only lead to a greater understanding of the world around us. Additionally, it makes this data more searchable, and in turn then makes it more accessible for those who want it or need it. I think a large part of progressing human development is to actually want to advance it. Those who have the incentive to change the world now have the ability to do so through Gapminder.