Rosling’s initial goal for his survey was to determine how much his students already knew about global health by giving them 5 pairs of countries and asking which country in each pair has a higher child mortality rate. However, when he was compiling the results, he realized the significance of his test. With his class scoring at an average 1.8 questions right, Rosling had shown that Sweden’s topmost students knew statistically less about the world than chimpanzees, who scored an average of 2.5. He administered the test to those of his colleagues at the Karolinka Institute that award the Nobel prize and found that with an average score of 2.4 they scored on par, if not slightly lower, than the chimps. This shows how skewed most people perceive the world around them. The reality of a third world country today is very different today than what it was in the 60s, but perception of these countries by people in developed countries has not evolved along side them. People in developed countries view vastly underestimate the progress and development that has been made in third world countries.
Social change preceded economic growth in Asia. Health and wellness were invested in and promoted. The people became more educated about their health, most significantly family planning. Families got smaller and lived longer, a key factor in development that cannot be bought with money. This change helped spur economic growth, which catapulted their development at a much more rapid pace than those of countries who gained money before health.
There is a very strong linear relationship between child mortality rate and GDP per capita. As the GDP per capita of a region increases, the child mortality rate decreases. Basically, the more money a country has, the more their child survival rate improves.
In 1962, there was a very distinct separation between developed and developing countries. Developed countries had high income levels and developing countries had low income levels, creating a significant divide between the two. However, as time has gone on, that divide has all but vanished. Now both developed and developing countries each have a range of income spanning to both ends of the spectrum. Most people all over the world fall in the middle portion of the scale, creating a much more balanced distribution. ### 5. What is the significance of how Hans Rosling uses data to describe global human development in terms of high spatial and temporal resolutions? How does this relate to his previous observation regarding preconceived ideas?
In this TED Talk Hans Rosling makes a point to show how vastly different data from countries from the same region, and even people from the same country, can be. He does this to illustrate how you really can’t make blanket statements or judgements about any region of the world. Therefore, you can’t just look at a continent and assume they all need aide for the same. Solutions need to be made for countries base on its individual problems. This goes back to the preconceived notions from the beginning of the talk. Let’s take Africa for example. A lot of people hear Africa and think of starving children in huts and assume that every nation in Africa is very poor. But, the continent is actually very diverse when it comes to economic standing and levels of development.
Like we discussed in class with Blumenstock’s Humbler Data Science, the best path forward in the combination of these fields is through transparency and collaboration. Both are at the core of Rosling’s Gapminder project. Gapminder’s first objective is to take data that is hard to read, not being used, or inaccessible and transform it into information that everyone can see and use. This gets at the heart of what increasing transparency in the field should be and why it needs to happen. Gapminder’s second objective is to link all the data and make it searchable. Not only would a feat like this take a great effort of collaboration between databases, but it also then in turn promotes future collaboration by promoting the use of data from multiple sources. Rosling’s Gapminder is a practical (and in my opinion amazing) example of how to make data usable and global so it can be used to foster human development.