Watch 200 Years of Global Growth In 4 Minutes

kkleiner writes "A professor of international health in Sweden, Hans Rosling has a long history of exploring the facts and figures that surround our changing world. In the a segment of the BBC series, Rosling gives one of his most famous lectures with a new twist. Using 120,000+ bits of data and augmented reality, the exuberant professor takes us through the last 200 years of global history and its uneven growth of wealth and health." This is really worth watching. Seriously.

Comments

Re:I saw a more indepth version of this some time

[MintOreo]

http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_reveals_new_insights_on_poverty.html Here, I'm guessing. It's a worthwhile watch.

Re:Family size

[Beorytis]

To a certain extent, you can create your own graphs with Hans Rosling's software from http://www.gapminder.org/

More than just infant mortality

[Comboman]

As far as I know, studies have shown that it doesn't matter whether you were born as a healthy baby back then versus now, as a person's life expectancy when controlled for infant mortality, has remained basically steady, with improvements in healthcare cancelling out all the crap we try to kill ourselves with. It's just that we manage to keep more babies alive til they get cancer.

That's not entirely true. While the increase in average life span is not as dramatic if you remove the effect of infant mortality, there is still a huge increase in the last 150 years. For example, if you look at the life expectancy for a 10-year-old white male, in 1850 it was 58 years, in 1900 it was 60.59 years, in 1950 it was 68.98 years and in 2004 it was 76.3 years. There are lots of factors other than infant mortality that have improved over that time: safer working conditions, access to health care, even refrigeration (an astonishing number of people died of food poisoning in the "the good old days" speaking of "crap we try to kill ourselves with").

Re:shows economics and politics over time

[gambino21]

He slows the presentation to show World War 1 and the Spanish Flu epidemic but he didn't mention the Cultural Revolution in China during the 60's when the large circle representing China takes a HUGE dive.

The Culteral Revolution in China didn't begin until 1966, after China was on it's way back up. It was actually the Great Leap Forward that put many Chinese on the verge of starvation. Then during 1958-1961 several natural disasters occurred which, when combined with the existing problems, resulted in the Great Chinese Famine.