
The best stats you've ever seen (2006) [video] - beefield
https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen#t-857742
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okket
(2006)

See also
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=373041](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=373041)

1,631 hits for "rosling" here on HN
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=rosling&sort=byPopularity&pref...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=rosling&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

His website for presenting data:
[https://www.gapminder.org/](https://www.gapminder.org/)

I also recommend (from Max Roser):
[https://ourworldindata.org/](https://ourworldindata.org/)

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paol
"Don’t Panic – The Facts About Population" is probably the ultimate Rosling
presentation. Highly recommended.

[https://vimeo.com/79878808](https://vimeo.com/79878808)

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internaut
Hans's charts show convergence of undeveloped countries towards the West's
standard of living. Globalization basically.

This is a optimistic story but notice how the two largest wars in history are
mere blips. Only China's Maoist revolutions show up as periods of significant
radical decline.

Do not let the apparent stability of the gapminder presentation give you the
impression our society is on an ever upward trend. That belief is one we need
to snap out of and fast.

Major questions need to be asked of the past. There are serious holes in the
hypothesis that everything is getting better and better.

Why is it half a century since men walked on the moon. Almost 50 years. That
is a long time! Blah blah 'politics' doesn't cut it.

Why aren't new effective medicines being invented and why is the cost of
production in drug manufacture doubling every nine years while the costs of
discovery (genome sequencing and x-ray crystallography) have radically
declined.

Why are the majority of people in Western society's not getting richer over
the last two-four decades? The diversity of things to spend on has increased
without a real increase in the quantity of money in the bank account and
wallet.

Why did African decolonization result in epic (and ignored) failure? Today's
states are _poorer_ by most metrics than they used to be half a century ago.
Take a look at photographs of Egypt, South Africa and Zimbabwe from that time
period. The difference is undeniable.

Why aren't prices declining for basic materials in house construction? During
the housing boom up to 2008 (materials should have been expensive) basic
materials were _cheaper_ than they are now. It seems like nobody is talking
about basic supply & demand being inverted. You cannot explain this with
economies of scale or price rigging cartels, there are limits to those things.
Prices have doubled for basic materials while demand radically dropped in the
interim (at least in my country, about 5k builds last year in the capital).
Does anybody understand what the fuck happened here? A new build today must be
> 300k as a result. We'll have an epidemic of homelessness if this continues
for much longer.

I can point out lots of good things that happened in the last half century,
such as the Net, it is just that major questions are utterly ignored by the
media and happy-go-lucky TED talkers.

~~~
internaut
Here is another post which might go some way to explaining my defiance of the
Nordic data-hero Mr Rosling:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12197054](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12197054)

I love Han's charts too, I do appreciate the significance of growth for the
world over the past few centuries but I just can't sit and as one fellow said:
"lie back and allow the movie of the future to unfold".

In the 70s with OPEC, the Club of Rome, there was a lot of feeling in the air
that we were plateauing, even declining. That turned out not to quite be true,
but nonetheless it was some kind of important inflection point where something
started happening or stopped working. If 2008 was a similar inflection point
then it is time to consider the possibility we may be going into a stall
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stall_%28engine%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stall_%28engine%29))
instead of progressing.

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lsh
site requires javascript, here is link to plain video:

[http://video.ted.com/talk/stream/2006/None/HansRosling_2006-...](http://video.ted.com/talk/stream/2006/None/HansRosling_2006-320k.mp4)

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woliveirajr
Funny: went to his site tho find out if he does more details on how he make so
beautiful graphs, and the "labs" link has a error in database connection:-)

Does he use some specific developed software tho do his graphs and animations?

~~~
okket
See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trendalyzer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trendalyzer)

~~~
woliveirajr
Thanks! I'll try to use the API...

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vonnik
Can we capitalize Rosling and add (2006) in the title?

~~~
beefield
Sorry. Obviously I should have done that already when submitting, but I guess
I did not think too much. I do not seem to be able to make the edit (not
enough karma?)

