

Hans Rosling: Why the Statistics Point Toward Progress - cwan
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_34/b4144064844053.htm?chan=magazine+channel_special+report

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petercooper
It's great to see a moderate, experienced voice weigh in on things. Several
months ago, a lot of doomsayers were getting more credence than they should
have from the geek community (the US is going to descend into chaos within 6
months crap, etc - give me a break) but as always, the "middle way" proves
right. Even if we've lost a stackload of wealth, we're still better off than
99.9% of the rest of humanity who came before us.

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fnid
A lot of statistics say that we are getting less happy over time. Sure,
numerically, we are living longer, infant mortality is declining, but we are
less happy.

Isn't happiness the goal? Are we really better off if we are unhappy?

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mynameishere
I think I was 10 or 11 when I realized that things can only make the tiniest
and most temporary changes in one's level of happiness. (No kidding; it's not
an especially novel idea.)

Anytime you're dealing with "doomsayers", you can almost bet that that person
actually _wants_ their variant of doom to occur, often for the tremendous
corrections required. The effect of a real economic collapse would be:

1\. A great reduction in "things" (read: toys) available.

2\. A greater day-to-day struggle for necessities.

3\. A replacement of humanity's highly variable yet trivial problems with one
big, common problem.

There's every reason to believe that the above three things, if not taken too
far, are actually a prescription for happiness. There's a forth one, of
course:

4\. A fundamental change in the ruling class.

That, of course, could be bad or good, but it explains why the government is
happy to spend 100s of billions to fight every dip.

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gruseom
_Anytime you're dealing with "doomsayers", you can almost bet that that person
actually wants their variant of doom to occur_

That is an excellent observation.

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mhb
If you haven't seen his TED talk, it's here:

[http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_y...](http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html)

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sp332
He's actually given three talks at TED and one at the US State Department
which is accessible from his TED bio page,
<http://www.ted.com/speakers/hans_rosling.html>. The software is using is
available at <http://www.gapminder.org/>, which was bought by Google about 2
years ago.

