Hans Rosling and Statistics
Have you ever seen software that animates and compares data in an utterly useful yet also entertaining way? I hadn’t, until this presentation… At last year’s Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) conference, the Swedish leader of the organization Gapminder gave a fantastic talk. Here’s the video of “Hans Rosling: Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you’ve ever seen”.
What Mr. Rosling advocates is freeing the dizzying array of statistics about nations of the world (available from the UN), all of which are in their unique formats and incompatible units. By “freeing,” I mean he wants to make the data accessible in a format that allows people to form hypotheses about the data. The question “How has the world distribution of wealth changed since the 1960s?” can be answered through an exhaustive statistical analysis — and there is still a place for that. However, if people wish to discuss this, a visual tool which illustrates these trends is tremendously useful… this is what the Gapminder organization is developing.
Now, the talk itself is tremendous, it is done “with the drama and urgency of a sportscaster,” which makes it mesmerizing.
The fact that there are “instant replays” is hilarious and useful. Here were some interesting points by Mr. Rosling:
- “It seems you can move much faster if you are healthy first, than if you are wealthy first. Health cannot be bought at the supermarket. You have to invest in health, you have to get kids into schooling, you have to train health staff…”
- “We have a much more mainstream view of the world, in which countries tend to use their money better than they did in the past.”
- “The improvement of the world must be highly contextualized.”
That final point is extremely important - we can’t talk about “improving Africa,” we must talk about “targeting the delivery of AIDS prevention in these principalities, and educating the doctors needed in these other areas.” Visual statistics will help us improve our mental picture of what is happening around us.
If you watched the first video, take a look at this year’s follow-up, with a “literally jaw-dropping” twist at the end.