Review 4: "The Best Stats You've Ever Seen" by Hans Rosling

As a whole, I really liked this talk, and I felt it presented a pretty strong argument. Basically, Rosling attempts to debunk the preconceived conceptions that global citizens believe. First, he explains how he gave a multiple choice quiz to some of his students about which of two countries had a higher child mortality rate. There were five questions on the quiz, and the students got an average of 1.8 correct. Rosling notes how chimpanzees would get 2.5 correct, on average, and then remarks that he gave the same quiz to professors, who scored an average of 2.4 - still less than the chimpanzees. This really is an important piece of evidence for Rosling, as it shows that humans generally have misconceptions about the world as a whole.
Rosling then backs up his initial statement by showing how the life expectancies and family sizes of countries has changed since the early 1960s. Based on Rosling's findings, it appears that countries with smaller family sizes have higher life expectancy rates. It's always been perceived that first-world countries have smaller families and higher life expectancies, whereas third-world countries have larger families and lower life expectancies. Rosling explains that, although this was true back in the 1960s, the data shows that third-world countries such as China have moved closer and closer to the first-world countries on both levels, which I find really interesting.
Rosling then looks to shoot down another popular theory, which is that richer people should send aid to only the poorest percentage of the population. Rosling shows that the top 20% of the population, when looking at income, gets 74% of the world's income. The bottom 20% gets only 2% of the world's income. This means that the middle 60% gets only 24% of the world's income - a very small amount. Rosling then explains that we shouldn't just focus on that bottom 20%, as the middle 60% also appears to need financial aid.
Following these two arguments, Rosling shows some other models, but I found the beginning of his talk more interesting than the end of the talk, so I'll only refer to the two models mentioned above for now. As a whole, I find that Rosling's argument is really strong. A vast majority of the globe really thinks wrongly about developing countries, which I find really interesting. Although this talk was made more than 10 years ago, I still feel that it accurately represents the feelings we have towards these third-world populations. We think that they have really low life expectancies and that only African countries are poor. Rosling's data proves that these theories are both wrong. I would recommend this talk to most people, as Rosling's enthusiasm, mixed with his strong arguments, make for a pretty strong talk.

Link to Rosling's talk