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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.
...our growth is almost entirely based on the use of oil for transportation, new materials, pesticides, fertilizers, construction equipment, etc, etc, etc. It's going to be messy when it starts to run dry.
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_reveals_new_insights_on_poverty.html Here, I'm guessing. It's a worthwhile watch.
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. Some analysis relating political/economic systems to this graph is needed. When Smith wrote An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Wealth of Nations, it was because the UK was the outlier in the top right of this graph. Now that a lot of countries are in that quadrant, it is worth noting the outliers are now the few remaining in the lower left. These are the countries whose political systems most interfere with market forces and prevent their citizens from being productive.
People always complain about how great the good old days were. I guess this is a pretty solid evidence that they sucked.
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
I'd be interested in similar graphs charting family size vs. wealth, and family size vs. education. The wealth-gap is, in my opinion, a direct result of larger families (less money available for education and health care per child) vs. small families (the inverse). The question then becomes "why large families in the face of poverty" (cultural factors, education of women or lack thereof, children seen as support for people when they are old, child survival rate greater now than in the past but family behavior lagging behind)... and what can be done about it.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
It is amazing to see how much improvement you see in life expectancy around the world in mid 1900's. I believe that is due to wider availability of vaccines. Just goes to show how big of a difference vaccines have made around the world.
...our growth is almost entirely based on the use of oil for transportation, new materials, pesticides, fertilizers, construction equipment, etc, etc, etc. It's going to be messy when it starts to run dry.
Huh, well, from my point of view, the growth is based more so on just pure unadulterated knowledge. Knowledge of how to make all the above work for us despite its evils. As we increase knowledge this only gets better. As time progresses, we get better at exchanging and persisting knowledge (we're doing it right now on glowing squares in front of us but we could be across the world). It will only get messy if we stop promoting science, medicine, learning, education, research, understanding, translation, tolerance, etc.
Just another optimistic spin to put back on the already staggering performance we've exhibited relatively recently.
My work here is dung.
Is the lone red dot remaining in the Sick & Poor quadrant North Korea by chance?
Nope, it's Afghanistan. (I know because I replicated this graph using their website gapminder.org)... Just so you know, GapMinder World will color Afghanistan turquoise, not red.
He presented a very similar presentation in his podcast for TEDtalks.
www.TED.com
...omphaloskepsis often...
or, perhaps, "Works for Rackspace"
rewriting history since 2109
I applaud what he is trying to do. Seriously. At the same time, this guy needs to read a bit more about data presentation.
First of all, the background setting for this talk is a terrible choice. The windows make it difficult to see the individual plots, and what's up with the large ball of lights off to the right? Ugh.
His y-axis is also distorting the truth. With the y-axis beginning at 25 and going to 75, he is conveying a huge lie factor in the progress.
He needs to read Tufte.
P.S. here's a great map of life expectancy by country
It's pretty clear the lowest life expectancy in Asia is Afghanistan.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
They don't have to invent their own medicine from scratch. The technology, once created, is easy to export. If one country finds a breakthrough in the field of medicine, agriculture, or communications, the world at large is enriched by it.
How about we look at this again but eliminate several typical graphing mistakes....
First, let's have all axes start at zero, not at, say, 33% of the range. This would immediately show that there is less disparity between average lifetime then the presenter attempts to make you perceive.
second let's have a non-logarithm axes for a typical unit that is thought of as linear... money.
Third, if we are going to compare wealth then we should be comparing amount of money held vs what it can buy, not just raw money per person. Sure people in the Congo have far less dollars per person than Japan. But a loaf of bread and the supplies they want to buy are far, far cheaper. In other words, it is possible for a smaller amount of currency from economy A to buy more goods and services in economy B. You need to account for this in determining "wealth". You can't just exchange currency rates to determine who is better off.
Lastly, You also have to dollar adjust for inflation even for specific countries over time. A typical mid-range american car in 2010 costs around US$25000; in 1977... US$5000. So, yes we might have more dollars per person in the US today but you're going to need 5 times as many dollars as you had 33 years ago in order to just break even.
And, while we are at it. I would get rid of the enthusiastic and "compelling" presentation acting. This is always a sign of attempting to market more than is really there. It is science through how the presenter can make you "feel" and it leads to poor knee-jerk decisions.
I will never live for sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
in between the life expectancy and wealth. some countries have achieved similar life expectancy with the rich west, despite being on the left hand side of the graph.
Which graph were you looking at? There is a very strong correlation since the Industrial revolution, that's why the dots all tend to line up along a curve following the diagonal. If there was no correlation, then the dots would be distributed in one or more purely horizontal bands. They are not. They are, instead, lined up along a very nice curve.
The correlation was lower before the Industrial Revolution, and has lessened in recent years as health care in general, including nutrition and reduction of infant and maternal mortality in specific, have been globally improved. Saying that there is little relevance between wealth and life expentency is seeing what you want to see in the data, rather than paying attention to the facts.
But holychrist, Congo is now back in the stone age thanks to the relentless wars there. The video also provides a marvelous indication of how profound the 1812 influenza epidemic was.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
While that may be true, do you think this graph was made off of a census specifically sanctioned within the borders of North Korea by Hans Rosling himself, or do you think he's going by existing census and income information?!
I'm not saying the data is correct, I'm saying that dot in the lower left quadrant of the graph is Afghanistan and not North Korea.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00wgq0l/The_Joy_of_Stats/ In response to my own question as to whether there's a full program. Yes there is. Going to watch that now :)
Great video and argument for the need for well-made methods for present data, but there are a couple of issues I think need to be addressed with this video:
-One is that I'm seeing quite a few misinterpretations on life expectancy in various comments, and though not expressly stated, even in the implications suggested by the professor himself.
It is important to keep in mind that life expectancy is almost always calculated as the full blown all-inclusive average of "age-when-people-died". While this may seem like a very standard indicator for the overall health of a nation, it is actually highly influenced by natal and infant mortality rates.
Of-course, that's not to say that being able to keep a baby alive shouldn't be a measure of a nation's overall healthiness, however the misinterpretation comes in when there are comments relating this life-expectancy to vaccines and whatnot. It is a common urge (one that seems implicitly shared by the professor in the video) to associate mankind's technological achievements with a longer fuller life, but to discount all of the carcinogens, obesity, diabetes, and other newfound sources of death that have come hand-in-hand with technology is a very hasty move.
And for those that counter-argue about the elimination of disease, yes, do note the huge dips in life-expectancy in the plot as time progresses; but also observe that these dips, representing epidemics, only last for 2-5 years, and the population rebounds. My point is regarding the baseline equilibrium "life expectancy".
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.
-Secondly, I wanted to comment on the professor's utopian endgame of every country landing in the happy zone that is wealthy and healthy. It was common knowledge among the political big boys towards the end of Chinese communism (the economic form, not the social one. You can argue whatever you want if you feel like being ignorant, but a person driving an important Porsche Cayenne next to someone pulling a rickshaw isn't quite the equality communism originally set out for) that if China had the same proportion of its population become middle class as America, there wouldn't be enough natural resources (steel, fuel, etc.) on the entire planet to give every family an automobile.
My point there is that overall wealth, while better for a country and its individuals, is definitely not better for the planet. And given it's subjective nature, it doesn't necessarily mean everyone would actually be "wealthy". If a rich nation could buy something now that a poor one cannot afford, but in the future both countries could afford it, it would just make that item in question cost more due to increased demand. Effectively, every country being "wealthy" is exactly the same as every country being "poor". We could just make America and most of Europe as poor as a developing nation, and technically every country would be "wealthy". The quality of life wouldn't necessarily improve in that case.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Interpretation_of_life_expectancy
Yeah, it bugged me that they'd use "life expectancy" which usually is a tainted statistic when infant mortality is not excluded. However, the point was really the data presentation, and that was a good example of how it is possible to convey a lot more "big picture" information with current tools.
Those interested in such stuff should check out informationisbeautiful.net if they have not already run across it.
Someone had to do it.
Yep, that presentation is by far one of my all-time favourites on TED. Also neatly explain why my sister-in-law -- who studies microeconomics for developing countries -- did field work in Uganda and Sierra Leone.
China is building the largest sustainable energy projects in the world with the fossil fuel energy they have left.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/26/china-invests-solar-power-renewable-energy-environment
You can play with the data used to create this graph on his website. Very highly configurable...Warning: serious prodictivity killer.
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
Man, anyone else notice China drop like a rock circa 1960 and say, "Holy hell!"?
For a country that killed 20 to 40 million of its people through starvation (due to farm collectivization combined with insane internal politics) within living memory of many people still alive there, we should consider it a complete miracle that China has been able to morph into a 10%+ per year GDP growth country.
She wants her theme sound back.
Waaah wuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh.
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_reveals_new_insights_on_poverty.html Here, I'm guessing. It's a worthwhile watch.
That's the newer TED tallk. There is also an older one from 2006: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html
But look what $1 will buy you now that you couldn't buy 200, 100, 50 or even 20 years ago.
Pure inflation rates don't tell the whole story. How much would a bottle of penicillin have cost in 1810... when it didn't exist yet?
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
It was important in 1810. Babies mean future hunters, gatherers, farm labor for the tribe or family.
While being a screaming poop factory for a couple years, by age 4 a child could be tasked with simple gathering, clean up and food/tool preparation. By age 6-7 a child could be killing vermin, small animal hunting and other near adult, gender specific chores.
By age 10 a male child would be supporting hunting, fishing and farming and by 12 actively taking part in hunts, farming or by the mid 1800s industrial work.
Loss of a child on the American Frontier, the sub-arctic or in tribal societies was a huge loss of food, energy and future growth.
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").
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All that data is available. Turns out he's not some asshole saying "Trust me on this, you don't need to see anything." He's got a site where you can play with his data in his amazing graphing software, http://www.gapminder.org/. You can toy with the graph and run it backwards and forwards, and break out the information, you can download the raw data in excel format or view it on the web. All Creative Commons licensed.
It is quite open and available, and not hard to find to anyone willing to do even a cursory amount of research. Just key his name in to Google.
To me it seems like the GP isn't actually interested, just being a pedant whiner. "Oh his methods are flawed and it is too simple!" Of COURSE it is simple, it is a 4 minute spot for the BBC. It is not a dour academic presentation. That doesn't mean there isn't good data behind it, or that it isn't available. If you actually care, well then I'd say you should do research. After all that is what we are talking about. In this case, literally all you'd need to do is key "Hans Rosling" in to Google and the first site is his, with all the data and so on.
To the parent: Good analysis of why the GP is incorrect about his complaints.
To the grand parent: STFU and spend 30 seconds doing some research before being a pedantic whiner. If you care about facts and accuracy the least you could do is get them yourself.
So what will you call it when global production peaks?
A transition from oil to renewable energy. Oil production will peak from traditional sources, because renewable energy prices will crash through the floor, and production will soar.
What, iron? We have that. It isn't economically viable. And it will never produce enough liquid fuel to provide for the level of transportation we currently enjoy.
Then why does south africa use it for their diesel? Because it is.
You realize that coal will peak also, and isn't unlimited?
Because you can feed waste biomass into the system, like sewage, trash, and wood scrap. This already happening in Africa.
Population grows exponentially.
Paul Erlich, Tomas Malthus and the members of the flat earth society still believe this. The problem is that it is false, because captalism = wealth = less population growth. India, China, the USA, all have zero or rapidly zeroing population growth rate.
"Affluence" will peak once we reach the limit of exploitable resources on Earth.
Actually it will stop because people are starting to get satisfied with the amount of stuff they have. Once you have a house and an SUV, and maybe a motor home, what else do you want?
"Technology level" (whatever that means exactly) will peak given a large enough supply-shock to send researchers heading for the hills.
Because population growth will stop, innovation will stop the shortages, and wealth will grow, this just won't happen.
You do the math.
I did the math. Now let's see some math from the Malthus flat earth society, who's basic core fact (exponential population growth) is utterly wrong.
Responsibility is an addiction
Virtue is a temptation
Community is a cartel
"Doing" statistics? No. *Presenting* statistics, yes. The term "statistics" is a noun describing both the mathematical practice, and the data said practice produces. ie, "X% of people like Y" is a statistic. Producing that data requires applying statistics.
Gotta love the English language.
Adults are screaming poop factories too.
Once you have a house and an SUV, and maybe a motor home, what else do you want?
What the hell kind of question is this? I want a robot army and a heated pool and a jetpack and a gold toilet and a bunch of stripper girlfriends. And I want to eat steak and sushi and organic vegetables every day produced from my renewable-energy-powered fish-farm/ranch/year-round-greenhouse.
Because population growth will stop
Developed country population growth will not stop without closed borders, which is not politically fashionable. Developing country population growth will not stop without massive increases in wealth, which has real physical limits. Barring epidemics or massive warfare, how do you envision population growth stopping? Because nowhere on Earth is it stopping voluntarily.
innovation will stop the shortages, and wealth will grow
"Innovation" currently goes almost exclusively into creating new consumer trinkets, healthcare and military applications which destroy wealth, increase lifespan and consumption, and create resource shortages.
Now let's see some math
Here's some math for you:
Affluence = (Energy * Resources * Technology) / (Population * Labor)
Technology is taxed. Affluence is taxed. Population growth and labor are subsidized. Resources tend towards zero. What is the outcome?
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Developed country population growth will not stop without closed borders, which is not politically fashionable. Developing country population growth will not stop without massive increases in wealth, which has real physical limits. Barring epidemics or massive warfare, how do you envision population growth stopping? Because nowhere on Earth is it stopping voluntarily.
This is the central flaw of Malthusianism. If you look at this graph, you'll see that population growth (births/woman) slows down as you get richer, with some noted exceptions in cases of religion. This means that wealth = no population growth.
There are clearly limits to wealth. The question is how big they are. History shows us that they are a lot bigger than we think. Here is the question. What would happen if everyone had a US style suburban home. The answer is that the only thing stopping it is energy. This is because our suburbs are powered by fossil fuels, not renewables. If we changed the equation and switched to renewables, 10 billion people could live in suburbia. 10 billion americans = 100 terawatts. The solar influx to the earth = 175,000 terrawatts. The prices of metals are all going down, meaning that they are getting less scarce.
"Innovation" currently goes almost exclusively into creating new consumer trinkets, healthcare and military applications which destroy wealth, increase lifespan and consumption, and create resource shortages.
A lot of innovation is going into producing the hated consumer trinkets, but much is going into renewables and finding new reserves of metals.
Responsibility is an addiction
Virtue is a temptation
Community is a cartel
I see you failed to comment or notice the fact that a great many of the countries with the highest income and longest life expectancy are in fact European countries with heavy market regulation (social-democracies). Some of the richest and most productive nations happen to be the Northern European countries which are very "socialist" [in American terms]. In Scandinavia we tend to see ourselves as the "third way", a balanced mix of both systems.
I'm not advocating any ideology or economic system but I think your conclusion is a bit one sided and not in line with the facts.
P.S. I'm a citizen of a wealthy, social-democratic, Scandinavian nation, according to the OECD the citizens of my country are more productive than the average US citizen (127%). You can look up the data yourself at http://stats.oecd.org/ and the report "Productivity levels and GDP per capita".
But not all, and those that remain can have a huge impact. Such as basic hygiene, or oral replacement therapy (saved millions of infants in India and is dirt cheap) to take just two examples. There are many others such as certain vaccination programs that are relatively cheap and of great value.
Stefan Axelsson