Statistics against poverty and disease

Not many people can read music notes well enough to hear the music in their minds just by looking at a score of a composition they had never heard befores. Hans Rosling, a professor of medicine at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, claims that something similar applies to statistics. Pieces of raw data are like notes on paper, requiring a musical instrument and an interpreter so they can be understood by an average person. In fact, we can understand different data only after it has been very clearly presented with analogies that we can visualize.

The visualization of human development

A good decade ago, when Rosling was preparing his first lectures on the global public health for his Swedish medical students he quickly realized that they were having difficulties with visualizing the mass of data on medical and economic statistics which are the basis for studying the level of development of individual areas of the world. With the help of his son he started to write a computer program which would enable a clear presentation of the enormous amount of information in a way that would allow him to breathe life into this data much like a musician who transforms the musical notation of a composition into sounds.

After a week or so, they had developed the first, test version of the software called Trendalyzer. They also had some help from his son’s wife who designed an attractive user interface. With this program, which they uploaded to the Internet and could be accessed for free, they could animate the chronological changes of the most important statistical data of all the countries in the world from the middle of the nineteenth century to this day. In 2005, after the program’s great success, Rosling founded the non-profit Gapminder Foundation whose mission was to “create free-access applications for the visualization of human development”. In March this year, Trendalyzer’s future development was taken over by the Google group that will continue to offer free access to the software to all internet users.

Rosling negotiated the software takeover with the famous Marissa Mayer who is, besides the both co-founders, one of Google’s most important people and has the last word in everything that concerns all the new products with which this internet giant continues making internet users happy. Mayer immediately advised him to add short and attractive video presentations of different applications of his brilliant computer program. Rosling at first thought that was a bit too much, because he was convinced that anyone would want to play with the mass of information and bring it to life with the help of the software himself, but he quickly admitted his mistake. It was evident that merely the data and the software for its visualization were not enough, just as music notes and a musical instrument do not make music by themselves. They need an interpreter and it turned out that, when it comes to statistics, Rosling is a natural. Rosling’s short lectures which he named GapCasts are also available on Youtube and are quite popular.

Today is different world

Rosling likes to joke that, at the moment, his software has two important target groups that like to use it: children to the age of twelve and influential politicians. It is characteristic of both groups that their attention has to be captured in a matter of seconds or they lose all interest. Important statesmen are usually always out of time, so they find this sort of visualization of statistical data very useful. After the end of the Cold War and in the era of globalization, on has to be up-to-date with all kinds of information, because the standard divisions of countries no longer apply.

The main message Rosling has been trying to convey to his students and, in the recent years, to the wider audience is that today’s world can no longer be described by using only traditional notions like dividing countries into developed and developing countries. By animating statistical data, Rosling has clearly illustrated that such divisions might have corresponded to the actual circumstances prevailing in the first decades after the Second World War, but to this day the world has changed completely. Many of the countries that had been completely undeveloped only half a century ago, and for which experts strongly doubted that they could change their patterns of behavior that had obstructed their progress any time soon, are today, according to several criteria very close to the developed countries.

He makes an example of himself by saying that he only knows two sorts of wine: white and red. Similarly, most people have a simplified idea about countries, dividing them into two types: the developed and the undeveloped. However, just as there is a very large number of sorts of wine, there are many different types of countries which becomes evident if one is willing to have a better look at all the information available. Rosling prides himself on knowing no less than two hundred sorts of countries.

As an example of miraculous development, Rosling likes to present Bangladesh during the last three decades. Today, this Asian country with almost one thousand inhabitants per square kilometer is the most densely populated of all the larger countries of the world. India, known to be very populated, ranks second with a population density three times smaller. 150 million people live in Bangladesh which is more than the population of Russia, while the area the country covers is no bigger than that of Florida.

In 1970, the women of this poor land east of India had an average of seven children and every fourth child died before he reached his fifth year of life. At the time, the opinion of numerous experts was that large families are so deeply rooted into the culture and religion of this country that the trend of the rapid growth of the population was not likely to change. However, after declaring its independence from Pakistan in 1971, the country’s general indicators of the development in health began to improve drastically. In 2003, an average Bangladeshi woman had only three children in her lifetime and only one in fifteen children died before his fifth birthday. But the main point is that this change did not occur because of the migration from the villages to the cities, but because of the improvement of the quality of life in the countryside.

The seemingly impossible is possible

Rosling also poses himself a seemingly unusual question: is the world today in average better than it was three decades ago? He finds the answer with the aid of the term extreme poverty. In 1970, 38 % of all people (1.4 billion), which is more than a third of all mankind, lived under the limit defining extreme poverty, surviving on less than a dollar per day. Extreme poverty means waking up hungry in the morning, going to bed hungry in the evening and spending all the time in between spending energy to get food. In 1990, 26 % of all people lived under the limit of extreme poverty and in 2000, 19 percent of mankind. According to projections, supposedly only 10 percent (0.7 billion) of mankind will live in extreme poverty by 2015. However, Rosling warns us that this data is relatively unreliable and therefore is not necessarily a completely accurate reflection of the present and past world.

Despite the unreliable data, most researchers still agree that during the last three decades the percentage of mankind living in extreme poverty has diminished by half. If, in 1970, two out of five inhabitants of the planet were hungry all day, in 2005, only one in five inhabitants of Earth remained extremely poor. That is why the conclusion that humankind can rescue its entire race from extreme poverty, which has now also become a generally accepted opinion among the experts, is very important.

Rosling has already accepted numerous awards and has been just declared one of the top scientists of the year 2007 by Discover magazine. Rosling is not merely a theoretician playing around with numbers, but has spent many years as a doctor in remote locations of the world. At the beginning of his career he even described a new disease in Mozambique and also discovered a successful therapy to fight it.

Apart from science, Rosling has a rather unusual hobby. He trains in circus arts. At the end of a now already legendary lecture at a conference in the US, and in support of his claim that even apparently completely impossible goals like ending poverty all over the world are actually not as unattainable as it might seem, he did something very unusual, especially for a scientist. He asked for a moment of silence, took of his shirt and, in the manner of an Indian sword-swallower, slid a meter-long Swedish army bayonet down his throat. He accompanied his performance with the following thought: “Sword swallowing is a cultural tradition that has for thousands of years inspired people with the thought that it is possible to think beyond the limits of the obvious.”