[Music]
but ten years ago I took on the task to
teach global development to Swedish
undergraduate students that was after
having spent about 20 years together
with African institutions studying
hunger in Africa so I was sort of
expected to know a little about the
world and I started in our medical
university Karolinska Institute an
undergraduate course called global
health but when you get that opportunity
you get a little nervous I thought these
students coming to us actually have the
highest grade you can get in Swedish
college system so I thought maybe they
know everything I'm going to teach them
about so I did a pretest when they came
and one of the question from which I
learned a lot was this one which country
has the highest child mortality of these
five pairs and I put them together so
that in each pair of country one has
twice the child mortality of the other
and this means that it's much bigger the
difference than the uncertainty of the
data I won't put you to test here but
it's Turkey which is high as there
Poland Russia Pakistan and South Africa
and these were the results of the
Swedish students I did that so I got the
confidence interval which was pretty
narrow and I got happy of course at one
point eight right answer out of five
possible that means that there was a
place for a professor of international
health and for my course but one life
late night when I was compiling the
report I really realized my discovery I
have shown that Swedish top students
know statistically significantly less
about the world than the chimpanzees
because the chimpanzee would score half
right if I gave him two bananas with Sri
Lanka and Turkey they would be right
half of the cases but the students are
not there the problem for me was not
ignorant it was preconceived ideas I did
also an unfair unethical study of the
professors of the Karolinska Institute
that hands out the Nobel Prize in
medicine and they are on par with the
chimpanzee there so this is where I
realized that there was really a need to
communicate because the data or what's
happening in the world and the child
health obviously every country is very
well aware so we did this software which
displays it like this every bubble here
is a country this country over here is
this is China and this is India the size
of the bubble is the population and on
this axis here I put fertility rate
because my students what they said when
they looked upon the world and I asked
them what do you really think about the
world huh well I first discovered that
the textbook was Tintin mainly and they
said the world is still we and them and
we is Western world and them is third
world and what do you mean with Western
world I said well that's long life in
small family and third world is short
life in large family so this is what I
could display here I put fertility rate
here number of children per woman 1 2 3
4 up to about eight children per woman
we have very good data since 1960 to
1968 on the size of families in all
countries the error margin is narrow
here I put life expectancy at birth from
30 years in some countries up to about
70 years and 1962 that was really a
group of countries here that was
industrialized countries and they had
small families and long lives and these
were the developing countries they had
large families and they had relatively
short lives now what has happened since
1962 we want to see the change or the
students right it's still two types of
countries or have these developing
countries got smaller families and they
live here or have they got longer lives
and live up there let's see we stopped
the world and this is all UN statistic
that has been a
here we go can you see that it's China
they're moving them against better
health they are improving there or the
green latin-american countries they are
moving towards smaller families your
yellow ones here or the Arabic countries
and they get larger families but they no
longer life but not larger families the
Africans are the green down here they
still remain here this is India
Indonesia is moving on pretty fast and
in the 80s here you have Bangladesh
still among the African countries there
but now Bangladesh it's a miracle that
happens in the 80s the Imams start to
promote Family Planning and they move up
into that corner and in 90s we have the
terrible HIV epidemic that takes down
the life expectancy of the African
countries and all the rest of the world
moves up into the corner where we have
long lives and small family and we have
a completely new world
[Applause]
let me make a comparison directly
between United States of America and
Vietnam 1964 America had small families
and long life Vietnam had large families
and short lives and this is what happens
the data during the war indicate that
even with all the death there was an
improvement of life expectancy by the
end of the year the Family Planning
started in Vietnam and they went for
smaller families and the United States
up there is getting for a longer life
keeping family size and in the 80s now
they give up communist planning and they
go for market economy and it moves
faster even in social life and today we
have in Vietnam the same life expectancy
and the same family size here in Vietnam
19 2003 as in United States 1974 by the
end of the war I think we all if we
don't look in the data we underestimate
the tremendous change in Asia which was
in social change before we saw the
economical change so let's move over to
another way here in which we could
display the distribution in the world of
the income this is the world
distribution of income of people $1 $10
or $100 per day there's no gap between
rich and poor any longer this is a myth
there's a little hump here but there are
people all the way and if we look where
the income ends up the income this is
100 percent of world's annual income and
the rich is 20% they take out of that
about 74 percent and the poor is 20%
they take about 2% and this shows that
the concept developing countries is
extremely doubtful we sort of think
about aid like these people here giving
aid to these people here but in the
middle we have most a world population
and they have now 24 percent of the
income we heard it in other forms and
who are who are these these where are
the different countries
I can show you Africa this is Africa
10% of world population most
impoverished this is oacd
the rich country the country club of the
UN and they are over here on this side
and quite an overlap between Africa and
oacd and this is Latin America it has
everything on this earth from the
poorest to the richest in Latin America
and on top of that we can put East
Europe we can put East Asia and we could
South Asia and how did it look like if
we go back in time to about 1970 then
there was more of a hump and we have
most who lived in absolute poverty were
Asians the problem in the world was the
poverty in Asia and if I now let the
world move forward you will seen that
wild populations increase there are
hundreds of millions in Asia are getting
out of poverty and some others get into
poverty and this is the pattern we have
today and the best projection from the
World Bank is that this will happen and
we will not have a divided world we have
most people in the middle of course it's
a logarithmic scale here but our concept
of economy is growth with percent we
look upon it as a possibility of percent
increase if I change this and I take GDP
per capita instead of family income and
I turn these individual data into
regional data of gross domestic products
and I take the regions down here the
size of the bubble distill the
population and you have the OECD there
and you have sub-saharan Africa there
and we take off the Arab states they're
coming both from Africa and from Asia
and we put them separately and we can
expand this axis and I can give it a new
dimension here by adding the social
values their child survival now I have
money on that axis and I have the
possibility of children to survive there
in some countries ninety-nine point
seven percent of children survive to
five years of age others only seventy
and here it seems that this a gap
between oacd
Latin America East Europe East Asia Arab
states South Asia and sub-saharan Africa
the linearity is very
strong between child survival and money
but let me split sub-saharan Africa
health is there and better help is up
there I can go here and I can split
sub-saharan Africa into its countries
and when it bursts the size of East
country bubble it's the size of the
population Sierra Leone the down there
more reaches up there
now reaches was the first country to get
away with trade barriers and they could
sell those sugar they could sell their
textiles on equal terms as the people in
Europe and North America there's a huge
difference between Africa and Ghana is
here in the middle in Sierra Leone a
humanitarian aid here in Uganda
development aid here time to invest
there you can go for holiday it's a
tremendous variation within Africa which
we very often make that it's equal
everything I can split South Asia here
India's the big bubble in the middle but
huge difference between Afghanistan and
Sri Lanka and I can speed Arab states
how are they same climate same culture
same religion huge difference even
between neighbors Yemen Civil War United
Arab Emirates money which was quite
equally and well used not as the methods
and that includes all the children of
the foreign workers who are in the
country data is often better than you
think
many people say data is bad there is an
uncertainty merge but we can see the
difference here Cambodia Singapore the
differences are much bigger than the
weakness of the data East Europe Soviet
economy for a long time but they come
out of the ten years very very
differently and there is Latin America
today we don't have to go to Cuba to
find a healthy country in Latin America
Chile will have a lower child mortality
thank you but within some few years from
now and here we have high-income
countries in OECD and we get the whole
pattern here of the world which is more
or less like like this and if we look at
it how it looks the world in 1960 it
starts to move 1960 this is mouths a
tomb he brought health to China
and then he died and then thanks your
ping came and brought money to China and
brought them into the mainstream again
and we have seen how countries move in
different directions like this so it's
sort of sort of difficult to get an
example country which shows the pattern
of the world but I would like to bring
you back to about here at 1960 and I
would like to compare South Korea which
is this one with with Brazil which is
this one the label went away for me here
and I would like to compare Uganda which
is there and I can run it forward like
this and you can see how South Korea is
making a very very fast advancement
whereas Brazil is much slower and if we
move back again here and we put on
trails on them like this you can see
again that the speed of development is
very very different and the countries
are moving more or less in the same rate
as money and health but it seems you can
move much faster if you're healthy first
than if you are wealthy first and to
show that you can put on the way of
united arab emirate they came from here
a mineral country they catch all the oil
they got all the money but health cannot
be bought at the supermarket you have to
invest in health you have to get kids
into schooling you have to Train health
staff you have to educate the population
and sheikh zayed did that in a fairly
good way and in spite of falling oil
prices he brought this country up here
so we got a much more mainstream
appearance of the world where all
countries tend to use their money better
than they used in the past now this is
more or less if you look at if you look
at the average data of the countries
they are like this now that's dangerous
to use average data because there's such
a lot of difference within countries so
if I go
look here we can see that Uganda that
today is where South Korea was 1960 if I
split Uganda there's quite a difference
within Uganda these are the quintiles of
Uganda the richest 20% of Uganda's are
there the poorest are down there if I
split South Africa it's like this and if
I go down and look at Nigeria where
there was such a terrible famine lost
Lee it's like this the 20% poorest of
Nigeria is out here and the 20% richest
of South Africa is there and yet we tend
to discuss on what solutions there
should be in Africa everything in this
world exists in Africa and you can't
discuss universal access to HIV for that
quintile up here with the same strategy
as down here the improvement of the
world must be highly contextualized and
it's not relevant to have it on regional
level we must be much more detailed we
find that students get very excited when
they can use this and even more
policymakers and the corporate sectors
would like to see see how the world is
changing now why doesn't this take place
why are we not using the data we have we
have data in the United Nation in the
National Statistical agencies and in
universities another non-governmental
organization because the data is hidden
down in the databases and the public is
there and the internet is there but we
have still not used it effectively all
that information was so changing in the
world does not include publicly funded
statistics there are some webpages like
this you know but they take some
nourishment down from the databases but
people put prices on them stupid
passwords and boring statistics and this
won't work
so what is needed we have the databases
it's not a new database you need we have
wonderful design tools and more and more
I added up here so we started a
non-profit venture which we called
linking data to design we call it
Gapminder from London Underground where
they warn you mind the gap so we thought
gap mind was appropriate and we started
to write software which could link the
data like this and it wasn't that
difficult
it took some person years and we have
produced animations you can take a data
set and put it there we are liberating
you and data some few UN organizations
some countries accept that their
databases can go out on the world but
what we really need is of course a
search function a search function where
we can copy the data up to a searchable
format and get it out in the world and
what do we hear when we go around I've
done anthropology on the main
statistical units everyone says it's
impossible this can't be done our
information is so peculiar in detail so
that cannot be searched as other can be
searched we cannot give the data free to
the students free to the entrepreneurs
of the world but this is what we would
like to see isn't it the publicly funded
data is down here and we would like
flowers to grow out on the net and one
of the crucial point is to make them
searchable and then people can use the
different design tool to animate it
there and I have a pretty good news for
you I have a good news that the present
new head of UN statistic he doesn't say
it's impossible he only says we can't do
it
and that's a quite clever guy so we can
see a lot happening in data in the
coming years we will be able to look at
income distributions in completely new
ways this is the income distribution of
China 1970 this is the income
distribution of the United States 1970
almost no overlap almost no overlap and
what has happened what has happened is
this the China is growing it's not so
equal any longer and it's appearing here
overlooking the United States almost
like a ghost isn't it it's pretty scary
but I think it's very important to have
have all this information we need we
need really to see it and instead of
looking at this I would like to end up
by showing the Internet users per 1000
and this software we access about 500
variables from all the countries quite
easily it takes some time to change for
this but on the accesses you can quite
easily get any variable you would like
to have and the thing would be to get up
the database is free to get them
searchable and with a secondly to get
them into the graphic formats where you
can instantly understand them now the
statisticians doesn't like it because
they say that this will not this will
not show the the reality we have to have
statistical analytical methods but this
is hypothesis-generating
I end now with a world where the
internet are coming the number of
Internet users are going up like this
this is the GDP per capita and it's a
new technology coming in but in
amazingly how well it fits to the
economy of the countries that's why the
$100 computer will be so important but
the nice tenders it's as if the world is
flattening off isn't it these countries
are lifting more than the economy
and will be very interesting to fall of
this over the year as I would like you
to be able to do with all the publicly
funded data thank you very much what if
great ideas weren't cherished what if
they carried no importance or held no
value there is a place where artistic
vision is protected where inspired
design ideas live on to become ultimate
driving machines
you