How not to be ignorant about the world. Hans Rosling continues his famous antics in this entertaining vid of a TED audience quiz linked below. Please watch and enjoy. Then please join me in looking briefly at the questions and how they are posed. Because with a little care you can avoid being fooled by Rosling and finishing more ignorant than when you began! Natural disasters are killing fewer persons, as Rosling notes. We know where most of the earthquake faults are now, and weve moved people off the flood plains and into cities, invented antibiotics and vaccines, and launched satellites for early warnings of severe storms. But also, weve famously reached the end of nature being the culprit in human disaster. Humans have taken charge of destruction: endless wars; antibiotics failing even as our civilization spawns many diseases never seen before; human-wrought climate change bringing unprecedented floods, bigger storms, greater drought and fire. Soon, hundreds of millions of us will need to migrate to higher ground, and hundreds of millions more will toil just for water to survive, and will stand in line for food handouts as crops fail. Rosling says half a million people died every year from natural disaster at the beginning of the 20th Century. But today, more than 50 million persons are displaced by mostly-human disasters (unhcr.org.uk/about-us/key-facts-and-figures.html), and global relief policies that continue business as usual cant solve the political causes and offer little hope. More persons are dying from hunger and malnutrition than ever before, all preventable. Gender equity in primary school is better now, but 66 million children go to school hungry (wfp.org/hunger/stats) and only 7% of persons make it through college. The questions we ask determine the answers we get. Also our bias. Take another look at the Rosling chart on distribution of wealth from $0 to $100 per day. What number should be in the middle? And what number does Rosling have? Put the right number in the middle and we see that income distribution is worse than 100 years ago. And if we chart how much money people have, rather than how many people have how much money, as Rosling asks, then we get the chart youll find here: inspiringyoutothink.blogspot/2011_10_30_archive.html It looks a lot like a fatal cliff, not a sturdy camel. So why does Rosling present this slanted picture and why does TED endorse it? Perhaps Rosling, TED and their studio audience are biased in favor of business as usual because they are still among the shrinking number of persons beyond the reach of human-caused disaster.
Posted on: Sat, 20 Sep 2014 19:45:35 +0000
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