Let My Dataset Change Your Mindset- Hans Rosling

In the lecture, “Let My Dataset Change Your Mindset” Hans Rosling uses his own data to challenge different myths about the “Developing World” and why they should be challenged. 

Rosling’s students had preconceptions about “we” and “them”, which in their words meant the Western World and the Developing World. They said that they learned it in college. THe students basically said that the larger your family, the shorter your life expectancy and visa versa. When Rosling separates all the regions into countries, Africa seems to all the stay around the same place, poor. As for the other countries, most of them seem to be spread out along the chart. And then you have the U.S. and that tends to stay at the top of the chart. When he zeros in on specific countries like that, the results change dramatically because the different countries have different advancements and such. Money, of course, has everything to do with this. All of the data that Rosling is exhibiting helps challenge assumptions such as the fact that war is the cause of disease. It’s necessary to challenge them because things aren’t always what they seem. To make something better, we must first understand everything about it, even what we all think may be true. When good data is collected, we are more able to understand what it is that we are studying. 

Rosling ends by saying that the world isn’t one of the “western world” and the “developing world” but more so of a converging world except for the bottom billion. The bottom billion is just as poor as they’ve always been.

Rosling, Hans. “Let My Dataset Change Your Mindset.” TED Talks, 2009. Web.