Hans Rosling: The Seemingly Impossible Is Possible

I loved this talk. The presenter has such a catchy optimism: "We need to get serious, so what do we do to get serious? A power point slide!".

The main theme of the talk is how less fortunate countries (in financial terms) are striving to achieve the same (in terms of health and education) as (what do they call them?) "highly industrialized countries" (meaning reach).

It is amazing to see that countries like Japan and Philippines can do so good and will probably do even better with much less. As always there is another side of the story: the few very rich countries gather their wealth from resources of the impoverished countries. Or in other words: you don't want your miners to get clever and ask for more, you just want them to dig up the gold and give it willingly to you for free. It's all in interests and whose interests they are.

I find that (as with my previous video post) the most interesting people are the ones who have traveled the world in its most forbidden and remote places.

Even the most worldly and well-traveled among us will have their perspectives shifted by Hans Rosling. A professor of global health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, his current work focuses on dispelling common myths about the so-called developing world, which (he points out) is no longer worlds away from the west. In fact, most of the third world is on the same trajectory toward health and prosperity, and many countries are moving twice as fast as the west did.

Rosling began his wide-ranging career as a physician, spending many years in rural Africa tracking a rare paralytic disease (which he named konzo) and discovering its cause: hunger and badly processed cassava. He co-founded Médecins sans Frontièrs (Doctors without Borders) Sweden, wrote a textbook on global health, and as a professor at the Karolinska Institut in Stockholm initiated key international research collaborations. He’s also personally argued with many heads of state, including Fidel Castro.

As if all this weren’t enough, the irrepressible Rosling is also an accomplished sword-swallower.

Have fun with the graphs here.