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A lot of people seems to be skeptical about this. There is a wonderful book called Factfullness which is written exactly for this kind of audience. In his book,
by blocked_again 8y ago
A lot of people seems to be skeptical about this. There is a wonderful book called Factfullness which is written exactly for this kind of audience. In his book, Rosling suggests the vast majority of human beings are wrong about the state of the world. He believes his test subjects think the world is poorer, less healthy, and more dangerous than it is. Bill gates sponsored this book for all the students graduating from college and I can exactly see why by going through this thread.
- camillomiller 8y agoAs a professional in the media field, I think I have an idea of who’s the first offender in propagating a doomier world view
- skrebbel 8y agoThat's... great. Any chance you want to share that idea with us?
- olig15 8y agoI’m guessing he means ‘the media’
- camillomiller 8y agoWell I thought it was quite obvious, but yes. It’s us. As everyone knows, fear sells. Nice good stories about how much better off we are now? Mmm, not so much. This doesn’t mean that huge problems don’t exist in the world. We have the duty to report on them. I personally try to do things differently than this, and I cover tech, so it’s easier and more neutral. If anything good stories about tech and progress still sell. I feel very detached from the trends of my industry, and so do many colleagues of mine with no power to take policy or business decisions.
- hyperpallium 8y agoThere seem to be a lot more natural disasters than there used to be. - Is this because better communications makes them better reported? - or are there really more natural disasters?
- chimprich 8y agoI would say both, to some extent. It appears that climate change is driving more extreme weather events such as hurricanes. And when natural disasters do occur, it's a lot easier to report on them when people almost anywhere on the planet can provide a video of it. I suspect the effect of natural disasters is also greater because of more people. A larger global population means more people are likely to be in the vicinity of natural phenomena, and higher population density means more people can potentially get into trouble at one time.
- gwright 8y agoCan you point to some graphs/data to support your claim regarding more extreme weather? There doesn't seem to be much actual evidence of that according to https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-tropical-cyclone-activity https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica... which says: Despite the apparent increases in tropical cyclone activity in recent years, shown in Figures 2 and 3, changes in observation methods over time make it difficult to know whether tropical storm activity has actually shown an increase over time. And this survey (https://www.omicsonline.org/open-access/trends-in-extreme-weather-events-since-1900--an-enduring-conundrum-for-wise-policy-advice-2167-0587-1000155.php?aid=69558 https://www.omicsonline.org/open-access/trends-in-extreme-we...) says It is therefore surprising to discover that by all the various real world data considered here, the weather in the first half of the 20th century was, if anything, more extreme than in the second half. I have not found any data, including in SREX, that contradicts these trends. Furthermore there are no signs of this trend changing (i.e. lessening and reversing) in recent years."
- 8y ago
- rco8786 8y agoRosling covers that pretty well in the book also.
- carlosdp 8y agoI second this, Factfulness is a must read and is what I immediately thought of when I saw this headline. It’s crazy how wrong I was about the state and direction of the world.
- anovikov 8y agoYou shouldn't be surprised about it. Public perception of all non-newsworthy stuff (and good news are not newsworthy, only creepy ones are) is mostly formed in schools, so it is late by about as much as the average person is past his or her school graduation, i.e. now it is stuck in mid-1990s. Mostly reflecting reality of that day.
- sushikokk 8y agoHe also has done a lecture about the same https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E
- 00deadbeef 8y agoAmazon is telling me this book won't be released until April next year. Are you from the future?
- jamiegreen 8y agoYou can get it now in the UK...
- reallydontask 8y agoindeed and pay more for the kindle version than hardcover, which is pretty surprising to say the least (I do realize that it's an offer but still)
- sien 8y agoReleased April 3 this year according to Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/Factfulness-Reasons-World-Things-Better/dp/1250107814?keywords=factfulness&qid=1537525812&sr=8-3&ref=sr_1_3 https://www.amazon.com/Factfulness-Reasons-World-Things-Bett...
- Certhas 8y agoI am a huge fan of Rosling and just finished his book. He doesn't just suggest/believe that people are systematically wrong (worse than random!), he measured it.
- close04 8y agoFor most people the problem is making the difference between poverty and extreme poverty. They draw the line below which differences stop mattering a lot higher. Below a certain quality of life level it's hard for them to imagine anything else can make a significant difference for the worse... or extreme.
- m_mueller 8y agoOne of my favourite talks is Rosling on washing machines. He makes the case that to have washing machines is a good indicator of middle class as it frees up a lot of time that can be spent well in education and quality of life improvements (payed jobs, home improvement and so on). The availability of washing machines in developing nations has risen dramatically over the last decades. There is now a huge bulge of people around the median world income, and the tail-end is getting smaller, i.e. between the world's poor and middle class the inequality seems to be shrinking actually. It's only the super-rich that appear to be out of control.
- kbutler 8y agoI had a maid in Thailand who did laundry for us, and her favorite person in the world was a previous employer who found and provided a washing machine. I haven't yet read the book, but I recently heard opposing statistics that washing machines don't necessarily free up much time, but they dramatically increase the amount of laundry done and expected cleanliness of clothing. (Jevons paradox) I suspect the truth is mixed, and that at lower income levels, it probably saves a lot of time, and at higher income levels, "consumption" of clean clothing dominates.
- m_mueller 8y ago
- grecy 8y agoI've been driving around Africa for over 2 years now. 25 countries in West and Southern Africa. There is a lot more development, infrastructure, happiness and success here than the majority of "First Worlders" have any notion of. Even when I tell my family directly they don't really believe me. 4G Internet, chip n pin (or contactless) Credit card payments, multi lane freeways, high rise buildings and of course electricity and drinking water. That's not just South Africa either, all of those exist in Rep. Congo, Nigeria, Cameroon, Mali, Zambia just to name a few examples of where people think of "poverty". I have come to the conclusion that anyone who hasn't actually set food on this continent (and ventured outside a guided "safari") has no way to discover the truth about this place. There is no media outlet that actual portrays an accurate picture, I have never even seen one that gets close.
- ams6110 8y agoI can believe that. Among those people in the west who even think about it, many are vested in the idea of African nations being hopelessly impoverished.
- grecy 8y agoI have found it to be so ingrained in people it's like an automatic response. The TV ads with all the starving "African" children of the 80s and 90s have sunk in, and stuck. Convincing people otherwise will be a herculean task.
- GreeniFi 8y agoI’m an African, I’ve lived all over the continent (until very recently). What you say is correct. By many metrics life has improved, and that is to be celebrated. But internally, I’m a bit conflicted because for sure this development has also come at a cost: (1) some of us now have electricity, but we’ve poisoned our city air, (ii) some of us have running water, but we’ve destroyed our watersheds and the severity of droughts is increasing, (iii) we have better roads (thanks China!), but we’re extensifying our farm land into forest because we’ve been caning our soils, (iv) we’ve got 4g and mobile money, but man, our leaders still brutalize us if we step out of line. In conclusion, I don’t dispute what you say, there is a great deal of wonderful progress on the continent, but the narrative should not be either/or, and of course varies by country, but it’s neither dystopian famine, or development utopia.
- GreeniFi 8y agoRosling, Pinker and Gates are right to point out that there have been absolute improvements in living standards across the globe. However as Jeremy Grantham (the British Warren Buffet) warns, these current improvements may have been bought at the expense of future losses as we have destabilized the climate and mined the soils to achieve the gains of recent years. Grantham projects 40% loss in soil productivity in a much more populated world. This is not to knock these fantastic advances, but we now need to double down on ensuring they are sustainable. Here’s Grantham’s paper. It’s a long but fascinating and wel-written read. https://www.gmo.com/docs/default-source/research-and-commentary/strategies/asset-allocation/the-race-of-our-lives-revisited.pdf?sfvrsn=2 https://www.gmo.com/docs/default-source/research-and-comment...
- rco8786 8y agoAdded to my reading list. But I do find something interesting about your synopsis. Something that Rosling touched on in his book as well. And that is that people from traditionally developed countries look at the more recently developed countries and can only seem to point out that they developed at the expense of the environment...by burning coal, mining the earth, etc. conveniently forgetting that their own country previously did, and still does, all those same things! We look at CO2 production of China and India and its way more than say, the US. But if you look at it per capita it’s still nowhere near the US.
- GreeniFi 8y agoI can only speak for myself (originally from a developing country), but I would not have overlooked that developed nations spent down their natural capital to achieve their modern prosperity. Where did all the trees in Scotland go? I can obviously only speak for myself, but I wonder if it’s a strawman argument. Re CO2 production, as per Grantham’s paper, there is a radical increase in renewable energy supply taking place. It still only gets us 1/3 of the way to avoiding 2 degree warming.
- noselasd 8y agohttps://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$chart-type=bubbles https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$chart-type=bubbles puts a vizualisation on the data backing this up - there's a lot of fascinating statistics to look at.
- kya_isro 8y ago" He believes his test subjects think the world is poorer, less healthy, and more dangerous than it is" People aren't idiots, they aren't wrong. Its Rosling who is wrong. Rosling is a propaganda machine for the crony capitalists who have destroyed nations in middle east and Asia, continue to do so even in "oh so rich" United States. After a century of decolonization and continuing war in the middle east, and palestine for oil and natural gas, Rosling is just telling us its getting better. Thank god!