Using publicly available data and an elegant software system, Dr. Hans Rosling, a physician and researcher from Sweden, is busy rendering old notions of global health and poverty extinct.
As Dr. Rosling explained during an Oregon Health Forum lecture last week in Portland, people often have faulty preconceived ideas about global health and poverty. The entire concept of developing countries and developed countries, of we and them, is an outdated relic, born of colonialism and Western superiority complexes. In fact, as Dr. Rosling’s well-designed Gapminder software shows, reality is a lot more complicated. This theory-generating program allows the user to choose which demographic, economic or health data to look at graphically, and then animates the changes over the years for individual countries or regions.
One example Dr. Rosling showed during his talk involved worldwide changes in fertility rates and life expectancy. In the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, the world’s countries did appear split into two distinct categories: countries whose population had long lives and few children, and countries whose population had short lives and many children. With a click of the mouse, Dr. Rosling animated the graph, showing the rapid changes that have occurred over the past 40 years. Vietnam, for example, has rocketed upward and is currently in the same place regarding fertility and life expectancy as the U.S. was in 1974. No longer neatly split into two camps, the world distribution of poverty indicators is all over the map. Rosling also demonstrated the enormous differences within countries and within regions, underscoring the idea that poverty and health interventions need to be highly contextualized.
Challenge your own pre-conceived notions about the world by checking out Dr. Rosling’s heralded talk at the 2006 TED conference, as well as the Gapminder software itself.