Yes, the World Is Getting Better!
What the mainstream media doesn’t tell you, the statistics will

ImagenAn example of the everyday ‘good news’ we so rarely hear: education levels are soaring in the developing world. (Photo by Alamy)

By Ed Cumming

Even if, down in the gut we feel that things are getting better, what about the hard facts, statistics? 

Meet Hans Rosling, the Swedish professor who is the closest thing statistics has ever had to a rock star who tries to tell a more positive story with data. His TED talk The Best Stats You’ve Ever Seen has been viewed more than 10m times. Last October the BBC aired a lecture, timed to coincide with new UN development goals (and made with input from Hans), called How to End Poverty in 15 Years. Hans lectures all over the world to rapturous audiences, making his points with humor and  striking visuals. To watch him in full flow is to feel, in a funny way, proud to be human.

In 1999, together with his son Ola and Ola’s wife Anna, Hans founded  Gapminder, a public-access site. At the site’s core is a customizable graph, where you can plot different data trends against each other and break them down by country. If you ever wondered how female literacy correlates with GDP, Gapminder is where you can find out. There is plenty of good news.

Not that you should put it like that to the Roslings themselves. “It’s not good news,” Ola says, when I suggest that this is the effect Gapminder – and Hans’s presentations – give the casual reader. “It’s just news. It’s factual news.

It appears good because the default worldview has so much negativity.

But sometimes the news is negative: look at the refugee crisis, climate change or inequality in the USA. We are trying to promote a state of mind called factfulness. This is a relaxing feeling of not carrying around opinions that often have no basis in reality. “

For the Hanss, the opening up of global data represents a revolution in social sciences. “It’s the first time we’ve been able to understand our own societies based on facts,” says Ola. “And we’re measuring ignorance in the public, to guide us to the most misunderstood facts. People have such a gloomy picture of the world: that there’s no democracy in Africa, for instance, which is absolutely wrong. Democracy in Africa has changed like crazy over the past 40 years. There has been an amazing improvement.”

Gapminder and Our World in Data are a treasure trove of surprising thoughts and facts. Artificial light produced by LED since 2006 is 13,500 times cheaper than produced by candlelight in 1300. At the start of the Vietnam War in 1964, the US and Vietnam had wildly divergent life expectancy and family sizes; by 2003 they were the same. Since 1960 Thailand has achieved improvements in child mortality rates that took Sweden 150 years. Old ideas of “western” and “developing” countries, or that it’s possible to think of sub-Saharan Africa as any kind of homogenous bloc, are completely debunked, even while they remain in circulation in our media.

Misconceptions exist closer to home, too. Take the subject of inequality, where it is tempting to lump the UK in with the US. “People make the mistake of framing the UK as a softer version of what’s happening in the US,” says Hans. “But it’s not true. Recently the very richest in the UK have had much more rapid income growth, and inequality grew sharply in the 80s. But since then there has been strong growth for the majority of people in Britain. In the US inequality has increased for three decades, with stagnating incomes for the bottom 50% or so.”

Hans and his family have an agenda: to show the world as it really is, and as a consequence what might be possible.  Turns out, the possible and the positive go hand in hand.
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Gapminder
Posted January 2016
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