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Not All News Is Bad News
Focusing on the hourly media cycle gets mighty depressing for us news junkies. A stagnant economy, wars all around, desperate migrants flooding Europe and the US. But Hans Rosling, a public health professor in Sweden, shows the incredibly great news happening over the longer term. For the few of you who missed Thursday’s episode of Nyheder on the Danish Broadcasting Corporation’s DR network, I’ve uploaded a clip that deserves to go viral.
Thank you, Dr. Rosling, for giving me my new personal motto: “The facts are not up for discussion. I am right and you are wrong.”
Published in General
So where does Dane Boy gets his information? The Ministry of Danish Disinformation?
30 million Chinese living in caves? Whatever! Look at my shoe!
There may be plenty of bad things happening in the world at any given time, but I surely did appreciate this video! Reminding oneself of the achievements of the human race and the alleviation of so much animal suffering that we have contended with for generations…makes one glad to be alive in this time and place.
They’re both right: Things are getting way better and way worse at the same time.
As the late Senator Moynihan said, “You’re entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts.”
Here is a lot of the data:
It’s the Jihad versus McWorld conundrum, as Benjamin Barber once put it.
Nyrga-Hyrga-Bork! Bork! Bork!
Don’t know hoo I mussed ut.
Interesting. He *did* cite sources for his facts, and which sources should be eminently credible to his media interlocutor.
Still, I love the slack-jawed, open-handed lighting-strikes-twice-and-then-a-meteor-hits stunned expression on the show host’s face. What do you do with a guy like this?
That’s a magnificent talk linked in #5.
A few points: it’s not only the DHS and their data habits for which the world has an opportunity to thank the US. American dominance of the 20th century is why that century saw all the rest of those countries lift themselves, or be lifted, or booted, from poverty. Even at the the height of the cold war, America patrolled the sea lanes, which is as close to providing a direct global subsidy to every entrepreneur regardless of location as there will ever be. This contribution and a billion others are what made the rest possible.
The US State Department is indeed a “Department of the World”. We should rename it so, and establish an actual Department of State alongside it.
The income distribution chart shows an increasing “income inequality” at the same time it shows the near abandonment of hunger. Try explaining that next time you are confronted by some Gini ninny. Hint: it won’t do any good.
Finally, the good Prof comes very close to saying that the American and European breakout which precedes the global breakout (from sick and poor to rich and healthy) is a necessary condition of the latter. He is correct to acknowledge a debt to the US taxpayer, but seems oddly parsmonious with the rationale. Perhaps because he is addressing a group of State Department taxpayees, rather than a larger group. Perhaps.
As for his fundamental point; bravo.
Reminds me of Charles Murray on Realtime, “Bill [Maher], there’s no point in arguing over things we can look up.”
I like. He made very efficient use of his time.
Interesting meta-issue here. More on that — later.
I am a huge fan of Hans Rosling. You can find more on him at Gapminder, an organization he founded.
Thanks! Already shared The Washing Machine video with Hubby this morning.
You apparently missed the part @ 3:34 where he says Mexico’s only noteworthy problem is “arms coming from north…”
Dr. Rosling gets extra kudos for *NOT* using the annoying laser pointer on the Powerpoint[tm] screen and, instead, favoring the “manual assist” pointer of whatever is handy [mic stand, stick simple arrow head of black stage tape, etc.].
Carry on, good doctor. All is not perfect. But, surely, all is not lost.
Yes, there were several clunkers. I identified a few, there are more. His great service to conservative argumentation is in knocking down the quantitative arguments usually rallied against us as specious, not true, outdated. Some of this is done forcefully enough to imply that some arguments were never true. This is a validation worth having. Talk about winning on principle not technique!
He doesn’t address the qualitative differences (impact of culture on those numbers he cites and so forth), and I won’t fault him for it unless he tries to draw the line at numbers and insist that only his favored aspects of improvement are relevant. Somehow, I suspect he won’t. He seems like a data-driven guy, and I like that sort of thing.
I also recommend the great work of Max Roser at Our World in Data. Things have definitely been getting better and better. Even violence is way down around the world. It doesn’t feel that way to us because social media puts it right in front of us, but it is.
Agree.
Also—this is basically why I hesitate to claim myself as a self-made woman; didn’t America also, in effect, “patrol the sea-lanes” for me?
Violence went way down after WW2.
Yes. I resist the emphasis on policies versus culture, but that is because I am an individualist and not a socialist. Two people can look at the same data and come to very different conclusions.
His slide saying that it cannot be done with “one superpower” for example is entirely NOT data-driven – it is pure political pap. The “data” does not point to any such conclusion.
Re: Violence
Stephen Pinker has a magnificent but agonizingly dry treatment of the decline of violence in his “The Better Angels of Our Nature”.
Claire Berlinski says he’s a sloppy and refutable researcher. I think he’s right on, but like Rosling, subject to drawing overly comfortable conclusions from the data. C’mon, Claire, how about that data dump? :-)
Did you think it was dry, BDB? I thought it was, if anything, a bit too juicy, at least for someone like me, who has a hard time reading about torture methods and other evidences of human inhumanity. But convincing, despite/because.
This has some overlap with your “conservatives deny the autonomous perfectibility of mankind” piece, but I do think we can create (and are creating) conditions under which more and more human beings are less likely to express their most horrifying attributes, and freer to choose (and, for that matter, demand that others choose) the good, or at least the somewhat-less-bad. Whether we do this deliberately, semi-deliberately, by accident or via the intention and guiding hand of Nature’s God is another question, of course. The progressive (or is it the pastor?) in me wants to believe that, if we pay attention, we can figure out the formula and deliberately assist in God’s project. If the result isn’t quite “perfection” in my lifetime, I’d settle for “small-but-discernible improvement.”
Perfect yourself. Contribute to the betterment of society. Through government, punish those who transgress the Big Ones (murder, rape, theft and so forth). By all means, create conditions for success. But don’t make my orthodoxy part of your success metric, or you’ll shoot me when report cards are due.
And then you’ll be a Diet of Worms.
(Sorry, that’s a little inside ball, but I couldn’t resist.)
That’s awful.
What do the Dutch know about suffering? They split every check. Try picking up the full tab once a while, Clog Boy, then I’ll start listening.
Danish, Chris. Not Dutch. Danish.
Yeesh. Microaggression much?
BTW, BDB, how is this different from “You didn’t build that?”