Bild: UPF Lund

Already half an hour before last week’s Hans Rosling lecture was set to start the queue outside had grown long. The lecture was the result of a joint effort by the Association of Foreign Affairs and Studentafton. Well inside some people were forced to stand as the venue quickly ran out of chairs. Everybody wanted to see the now famous professor use his equally famous Gapminder graphs to try to answer the question of whether or not the world has become a better place. No small task it seems, but Rosling came up with an answer and had the stats to back it. And that was just the first 10 minutes of his presentation.

See also: Radio UPFs interview , A brief bio and a number of Hans Rosling’s talks at TED, Gapminder and Gapminder World,

Hans Rosling is the professor of global health at Karolinska Institutet who has become one of the absolute top names in the field of development and global health. His resume is as long as it’s impressive; as a medical doctor he spent a lot of time in rural Africa investigating the causes of konzo, a disease he named himself. Back in Sweden he co-founded Doctors Without Borders Sweden. He is also the co-founder of Gapminder, a non-profit organization he started together with some of his family. This organization has taken him all around the world meeting politicians, bureaucrats and scientists. With the help of the software Gapminder World Rosling has managed to make statistics fun and he has taken it upon himself to use this talent to debunk old myths about the state of the world.

The talk held at the packed Café Athen had the title “Has the World become a better place?”. Rosling fired up Gapminder World on the big screen and presented the state of the world as it was year 1800. He then fast forwarded until the beginning of the 21^st century. No matter what indicator of development presented a clear positive development for the world was undeniable. And not only has the world on average become a better place, every country has. The worst-off countries today are at approximately the same level of health and income as the countries that were the best-off in the beginning of the 19^th century were then. So yes, the world has become a better place. After this conclusion the talk changed direction to the professor’s favorite subject, namely the tendency to separate the world into developing and developed countries. Rosling has a personal vendetta against this and similar divisions. The pace of development since the beginning of the 1800ds has differed greatly and in the 1950s it was perhaps reasonable to divide the world into the “west and the rest”, but Gapminder shows us that a lot has happened since. Today, the same division would put a country as rich as Chile (which recently joined the OECD) in the same group as the Democratic Republic of Congo, where a professor told Rosling that they weren’t a developing country “because we’re not developing.”. And it is not just GDP-levels that have diverged among “developing countries”: life expectancy, child mortality - no matter what indicator used - a continuous spectrum of the world’s countries appeared on Rosling’s graphs. It is clear that any division between developing and developed countries has to be arbitrary.

So instead of using this separation, Hans Rosling recommends one with more steps. He describes the World Bank’s definition of Low income (a GDP of less than US$1,000 per Capita), Middle income and High income (more than US$10,000) as one more fit to use, even if he has a few complaints about that one as well. Rosling would prefer the use of Purchasing Power Parity dollars instead of exchange rate dollars as it is now and he would also like to add a category of failed states (he mentions Afghanistan and Somalia), who need to be given specific attention in statistics.

But why does this division matter? Well, it matters because our view of the world forms how we deal with the world. Take aid, as an example. Every year Sweden gives tens of millions of kronor in aid to China, a country with a foreign exchange reserve of 2 trillion dollars. Why? Because China is “a developing nation”. The case of Sweden’s aid to China came up a few times during the presentation as Rosling couldn’t help himself from poking fun at the arrangement. But other examples of Swedish aid also come up, such as the aid to Tunisia. Sweden has been giving aid to Tunisia since the 1960s but since then, the country has developed. Today Tunisia has a higher life expectancy than Sweden did in 1960s , and what with that being so, Rosling asks: shouldn’t they be giving aid instead of receiving it? However, he quickly points out that Tunisia is still poorer than Sweden in the 1960s, so maybe such a plan is a bad idea.

Rosling is in no way an opponent of aid, in fact quite the opposite. Development, we are to understand, is like a train headed towards Simrishamn. For it to reach its destination 15 different things are needed: electricity, tracks free from snow and so on. If only one of these fail the train will not reach Simrishamn. And the same is true for of development; infrastructure, health, functioning markets and many more factors are all vital for a development progress. And these require money to work. So the critique against aid is simply that it is misused and misplaced; perhaps the aid to China would do more good in Congo?

Hans Rosling covers many more subjects during his talk, among them the questions of the rapidly increasing world population (”we either plan for 9 billion people or we have to start killing people”), why an United Arab Emirates minister wants to strive for gender equity in the country’s universities (they have the highest proportion of female students in the world), when China will catch up to the United Kingdom in development (the 27^th of July 2048) and many, many more.

A talk by Hans Rosling is as funny as a stand-up and as world view-changing as a trip around the globe. This one was no exception and nobody left Café Athen disappointed.

KARL MCSHANE