One of the most interesting “thinkers” of the late 20th century was Swedish physician Hans Rosling. He became well-known through his participation in the TED Talks, part of the annual “Technology, Entertainment, Design Conference.”
Rosling’s basic works on public health led to his passion for statistics and the presentation of the numbers in a way that made sense to even the layman. He was cofounder and chairman of the Gapminder Foundation, which developed the Trendalyzer software system with which he could show the development of different societies in relation to each other regarding specific issues. For example, empirically there is a point in the size of a nation’s economic output per person that can trigger a leap in better health care.
Published after his death in 2017 was his book Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World.
One of his greatest complaints was that the way people in general and most academics look at the world is outdated based on current data. He was particularly annoyed with the idea that there are “developed” countries and “un/under-developed” nations.
For example, we think that “big families and high infant mortality” are traits of “developing countries” and “small families and low infant mortality” are found in developed nations. However, the fact is that by those definitions, most of the world is developed with more countries falling within that traditional developed definition.
Perhaps, more important, is that even highly educated and aware people are not aware of the current reality. When Rosling presented certain economic and social data about “First World” and “Third World” countries to graduate students, they confirmed that this was the way the world was in the 21st century. However, in every case, it was actually data from the 1950s and 1960s.
This was even true about their own home countries. The bottom line was that the economic and social improvements over 40 or 50 years simply did not register even for the society that they lived in every day.
There is almost paranoia about the world. There is almost a need to see a negative situation where none exists or to exaggerate the negative situation. The danger is that if we believe that the world is in very bad condition with unsolvable problems, we will not try to solve those problems.
If the world is really going to end in 12 years as some climate “experts” are saying, then “Why Go to School When the World Is Burning?” as some climate-change striking students said recently.
The “doomsayers” think that they are leading people to action by preaching hopelessness when, in fact, exactly the opposite is true.
Rosling wrote this before he died: “People often call me an optimist, because I show them the enormous progress they didn’t know about. I’m not an optimist. I’m a very serious “possibilist.” That’s something I made up. It means someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason, someone who constantly resists the overdramatic worldview. As a possibilist, I see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible. This is not optimistic. It is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful.”