Feb

28

Hans Rosling, from Dean Davis

February 28, 2009 |

As a doctor and researcher, Hans Rosling identified a new paralytic disease induced by hunger in rural Africa. Now the global health professor is looking at the bigger picture, increasing our understanding of social and economic development with the remarkable trend-revealing software he created. Why you should listen to him: Even the most worldly and well-traveled among us will have their perspectives shifted by Hans Rosling. A professor of global health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, his current work focuses on dispelling common myths about the so-called developing world, which (he points out) is no longer worlds away from the west. In fact, most of the third world is on the same trajectory toward health and prosperity, and many countries are moving twice as fast as the west did.

What sets Rosling apart isn’t just his apt observations of broad social and economic trends, but the stunning way he presents them. Guaranteed: You’ve never seen data presented like this. By any logic, a presentation that tracks global health and poverty trends should be, in a word: boring. But in Rosling’s hands, data sings. Trends come to life. And the big picture — usually hazy at best — snaps into sharp focus. Rosling’s presentations are grounded in solid statistics (often drawn from United Nations data), illustrated by the visualization software he developed. The animations transform development statistics into moving bubbles and flowing curves that make global trends clear, intuitive and even playful. During his legendary presentations, Rosling takes this one step farther, narrating the animations with a sportscaster’s flair. Rosling developed the breakthrough software behind his visualizations through his nonprofit Gapminder, founded with his son and daughter-in-law. The free software — which can be loaded with any data — was purchased by Google in March 2007. (Rosling met the Google founders at TED [Technology Entertainment Design Conference].)

Rosling began his wide-ranging career as a physician, spending many years in rural Africa tracking a rare paralytic disease (which he named konzo) and discovering its cause: hunger and badly processed cassava. He co-founded Médecins sans Frontièrs (Doctors without Borders) Sweden, wrote a textbook on global health, and as a professor at the Karolinska Institut in Stockholm initiated key international research collaborations. He’s also personally argued with many heads of state, including Fidel Castro. As if all this weren’t enough, the irrepressible Rosling is also an accomplished sword-swallower — a skill he demonstrated at TED2007. "Rosling believes that making information more accessible has the potential to change the quality of the information itself." Business Week Online


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2 Comments so far

  1. Nishikant on February 28, 2009 4:56 pm

    TED video was very impressive…the content and the software…

  2. Gavin Chait on March 3, 2009 5:13 am

    I was also very impressed with Rosling’s presentation of data at the TED talks. The problem I have, though, is that people become so mesmerised by his pretty graphs that they fail to notice he is binding data together that is not necessarily causal.

    For instance, he discusses health vs income/capita. He shows that investment in health results in increased income/capita. This isn’t necessarily true. Mozambique (amongst many examples) receives 50% of GDP in aid, mostly spent on health programs, and their income/capita is not really mobile at all.

    Correlation vs causation. It may well be that increasing income/capita improves health. However, Rosling is too quick to declare that governments should spend money on health in order to increase economic growth.

    Far more valuable is looking at the data in the Ease of Doing Business reports (inspired by Rosling) which give a clearer picture of how business red-tape, corruption and other legislative factors influence growth and, concomitantly, social factors like health and education.

    I’ve been compiling these sorts of mass macro-economic comparisons for the analysis of investment risk/opportunity for companies for the past few years, and I can tell you that the data is neither sufficiently extensive, nor robust enough, to be making the sorts of blanket statements about how to fix economic problems that Rosling proposes.

    Nice graphs, though, and they are certainly a fantastic lesson for boring old analysts like myself in how to present data to make it exciting and relevant.

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