The best stats you’ve ever seen, by Hans Rosling

Initial thoughts

• Bias makes the students in the first survey test worse on average than picking answers at random\
• The data doesn’t show as much when organized by continent, but when organized by country you get much more nuance into what’s going on
• “It’s dangerous to use average data… there’s lots of differences within [when you split the data up]”
• “Everything in this world exists in Africa”
• “The improvement of the world must be highly contextualized

Questions and responses

• What did Hans Rosling say about his survey of the new students in his institute and how they compared with his results from the Chimpanzees (as well as the faculty who decide the Nobel Prize winners)? What is the significance of the results from his informal surveys on precedented ideas?
  • The surveys showed that the students performed worse on questions about the state of countries in the world than they would have if a chimpanzee had guessed randomly. The faculty tested about on par with the chimps. These results show how the biases and misconceptions we hold tend to give us the wrong view of the world.
• What type of change taking place in Asia preceded economic growth?
  • Before economic growth, there was a major improvement in health and wellness in Asian countries. Rosling mentions this when looking at how Mao Tse Tun influence improved the child mortality rate in China in the 70s and 80s, and from there the country began to improve economically.
• In accordance with Hans Rosling’s TED talk, what’s the relationship between child mortality and GDP rate per capita?
  • Rosling uses child mortality as a measure of “social values,” and GDP per capita as a measure of wealth. Rosling then plots both continents/groupings of countries and countries on a graph with these statistics as its axes. This graph is used to show how diverse countries can be, even within the same continent/grouping of countries.
• In terms of income distribution, how has the world changed from 1962 to 2003?
  • From the 1960s to the 2000s, many people moved out of poverty. The graphs shown in the TED talk depict a large percentage of the population making less than 1 USD per day, and most of those people were Asians. As time moves forward and the graph changes, we see that same large percentage move farther down the X-axis until the graph reaches 2003 statistics, where that same large percentage of people now make more than 1 USD per day. The graph shows how the middle class is growing over time.
• What is the significance of how Hans Rosling uses data to describe global human development in terms of very high spatial and temporal resolutions?
  • The way Rosling presents data in this presentation adds nuance to the ways we look at the world. By showing how world statistics changed from the 1960s to the 2000s, we recognize that our own perception of different areas of the world is outdated. It also tells a story of how each country got to the state it is now in.
  • By starting with large groups of countries, like Sub-Saharan Africa, then breaking the data points down into their countries, then breaking them down into the classes of those countries, we see how diverse areas can be that we usually think of as the same throughout.
• In your opinion, why was Hans Rosling’s work on the Gapminder project significant to the remarkable process in the area of data science and human development?
  • Taking the data we have and presenting it in a format that is easy and engaging for anyone to understand is what makes the Gapminder project so powerful. There’s no use to data if you can’t efficiently analyze it, like Rosling does in this TED talk.

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