Hans Rosling

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pages: 288 words: 85,073

Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

"World Economic Forum" Davos, animal electricity, clean water, colonial rule, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, fake news, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, global pandemic, Hans Rosling, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), jimmy wales, linked data, lone genius, microcredit, purchasing power parity, revenue passenger mile, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Walter Mischel

“The best stats you’ve ever seen.” Filmed February 2006 in Monterey, CA. TED video, 19:50. https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen gapm.io/xtedros. . “Hans Rosling at World Bank: Open Data.” Filmed May 22, 2010, in Washington, DC. World Bank video, 41:54. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OWhcrjxP-E.gapm.io/xwbros. . “The magic washing machine.” Filmed December 2010 in Washington, DC. TEDWomen video, 9:15. https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_machine gapm.io/tedrosWa. Rosling, Hans, Yngve Hofvander, and Ulla-Britt Lithell. “Children’s death and population growth.”

About the Author Hans Rosling was a medical doctor, professor of international health, and renowned public educator. He was an adviser to the World Health Organization and UNICEF, and he cofounded Médecins Sans Frontières in Sweden and the Gapminder Foundation. His TED talks have been viewed more than thirty-five million times, and he was listed as one of Time magazine’s one hundred most influential people in the world. Hans died in 2017, having devoted the last years of his life to writing this book. Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Hans’s son and daughter-in-law, are cofounders of the Gapminder Foundation, and Ola its director from 2005 to 2007 and from 2010 to the present day.

Extreme poverty rate—v1, rough guestimation of extreme poverty rates of all countries for the period 1800 to 2040, based on the Gapminder Income Mountains data set. gapm.io/depov. Gapminder[10]. Household per capita income—v1. gapm.io/ihhinc. Gapminder[11]. “Don’t Panic—End Poverty.” BBC documentary featuring Hans Rosling. Directed by Dan Hillman. Wingspan Productions, September 2015. Gapminder[12]. Legal slavery data—v1. gapm.io/islav. Gapminder[13]. HIV,newly infected—v2. Historic prevalence estimates before 1990 by Linus Bengtsson and Ziad El-Khatib. gapm.io/dhivnew. Gapminder[14]. Death penalty abolishment—v1. gapm.io/ideat.


pages: 428 words: 103,544

The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics by Tim Harford

Abraham Wald, access to a mobile phone, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, algorithmic bias, Automated Insights, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Attenborough, Diane Coyle, disinformation, Donald Trump, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental subject, fake news, financial innovation, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kickstarter, life extension, meta-analysis, microcredit, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Netflix Prize, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, publication bias, publish or perish, random walk, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, sorting algorithm, sparse data, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, When a measure becomes a target

Ryan Singal, “Netflix Spilled Your Brokeback Mountain Secret, Lawsuit Claims,” Wired, December 17, 2009, https://www.wired.com/2009/12/netflix-privacy-lawsuit/; and Blake Hallinan and Ted Striphas, “Recommended for You: The Netflix Prize and the Production of Algorithmic Culture,” New Media and Society, 2016, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1461444814538646. Rule Eight: Don’t Take Statistical Bedrock for Granted 1. This is a translation of a Danish TV interview, discussed in Peter Vinthagen Simpson, “Hans Rosling: ‘You Can’t Trust the Media,’” The Local, September 5, 2015, https://www.thelocal.se/20150905/hans-rosling-you-cant-trust-the-media. 2. Laura Smith, “In 1974, a Stripper Known as the ‘Tidal Basin Bombshell’ Took Down the Most Powerful Man in Washington,” Timeline, September 18, 2017, https://timeline.com/wilbur-mills-tidal-basin-3c29a8b47ad1; Stephen Green and Margot Hornblower, “Mills Admits Being Present during Tidal Basin Scuffle,” Washington Post, October 11, 1974. 3.

New York: DC Comics, 1986. 7: Anna Powell-Smith, MissingNumbers.org. 8: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke. 9: Translation of a Danish TV interview, discussed in Peter Vinthagen Simpson, “Hans Rosling: ‘You Can’t Trust the Media,’” The Local, September 5, 2015, https://www.thelocal.se/20150905/hans-rosling-you-cant-trust-the-media. 10: Michael Blastland, personal correspondence, May 13, 2013. 11: Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, When Prophecy Fails. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1956. 12: Orson Welles, remarks to students at the University of California, Los Angeles, 1941.

Regardless of where you live, if you’re poor you’re likely to sleep on the floor in the same room as other family members. If you’re rich you’ll have privacy and a comfortable bed. Much of what we think of as cultural differences turn out to be differences in income. “Numbers will never tell the full story of what life on Earth is all about,” wrote Hans Rosling, despite being the world’s most famous statistical guru. (Hans was Anna Rosling Rönnlund’s father-in-law.) Hans was right, of course. Numbers will never tell the full story—which is why, as a doctor and academic, he traveled so widely, and why he so expertly wove stories to go alongside his statistical evidence.


The Naked Presenter: Delivering Powerful Presentations With or Without Slides by Garr Reynolds

death from overwork, deliberate practice, fear of failure, Hans Rosling, index card, Kaizen: continuous improvement, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Mahatma Gandhi, Maui Hawaii, mirror neurons, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, TED Talk

However, you should also move away from that lectern when you do not have to be there. Hans Rosling, a doctor, researcher, and presenter, is extraordinary at doing this. When he needs to pull up some data or start the Gapminder program, he will occasionally go to his computer on stage. But Rosling also spends a lot of time near or in front of the screen explaining how to read the data or pointing out important points. Rosling is a technical presenter with passion; he is able to engage his audiences with the visualizations of data in part because he removes the barriers by often moving away from the lectern. Hans Rosling removes the barriers and gets involved with the data, making things clear for the audience.

eBook <WoweBook.Com> It’s Not the Numbers, It’s What They Mean I’m a huge fan of Hans Rosling, the public health professor from the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm and one of the cofounders of Gapminder (www.gapminder.org). Rosling is the Zen master of presenting statistics and one of the most popular speakers at TED. Rosling proves what we all know: Statistics are not boring. But Rosling shows that it is not enough just to show data—what matters is the meaning of the data. Statistics tell a story. Photo of Hans Rosling by Stefan Nilsson. The way the Gapminder software displays data is compelling and clarifies the data while bringing the viewer in for a closer look.


pages: 356 words: 106,161

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century by Rodrigo Aguilera

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer age, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, long peace, loss aversion, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Slavoj Žižek, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, tail risk, tech bro, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, unbiased observer, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

Centrist, liberal magazines like the Economist have also ingratiated themselves into this camp, making deliberate efforts to play down left-wing doom-mongering over capitalism’s shortfalls, particularly since the global financial crisis has made a more absolutist defense of free markets and free enterprise untenable (full disclosure: this author previously worked for The Economist Intelligence Unit, a sister company to the Economist, but which produces its own independent content). Some other characters in this ecosystem are harder to pin down and don’t fall neatly within these two groups. These include the (recently deceased) TED Talk celebrity Hans Rosling, who mastered the art of using charts and other visual aids to seduce his audiences with optimism, or Oxford economist Max Roser, whose website Our World in Data is a statistical mecca for the movement even if Roser hardly proselytizes the narrative himself. He also appears to be the only one who shows any remote concern for issues like inequality and climate change, the former which the other New Optimists consistently play down as either not being an essential component of well-being and the latter as a problem which science will find ways of resolving in due time.

When Scottish philosopher David Hume provocatively stated that “tis not contrary to reason [by this meaning rationality] to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger”,7 he is saying that in purely utilitarian terms, it is possible to prefer a painless alternative (the end of the world) to a painful one (a scratched finger). But this is only a rational choice, not a reasonable one. Only somebody with omnicidal tendencies would feel compelled to do such a thing. Pinker may exalt his Enlightenment heroes with a zeal typically reserved for religious icons, but Hans Rosling, the late Swedish physician-turned-TED Talk star, took the supposedly unobjectionable rationality of optimism to the level of self-help. It’s not enough that facts are good and feelings bad, but that facts are so good that they become feelings themselves. In Factfulness, he appears oblivious to why his corporate audience would feel so giddy at the news that the world is so much better than people think: The basic facts about the world’s progress are so little known that I get invited to talk about them at conferences and corporate meetings all over the world.

Optimism has also been related to extended survival time of cancer and AIDS patients.29 Furthermore, it has been suggested that optimism biases may be the few types of misbelief that are evolutionarily adaptive. Psychologist Albert Bandura has argued that “If self-efficacy beliefs always reflected only what people could do routinely, they would rarely fail but they would not mount the extra effort needed to surpass their ordinary performances”.30 Perhaps “factfulness” isn’t as important as Hans Rosling would have us believe. The claim that seeing the glass half-full is advantageous appears to hold true for individuals. But what is good for the individual does not necessarily translate into something good for society. Societies, after all, do not suffer from mental health conditions that benefit from a dose of optimistic self-delusion.


pages: 406 words: 88,977

How to Prevent the Next Pandemic by Bill Gates

augmented reality, call centre, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, demographic dividend, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, Edward Jenner, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hans Rosling, lockdown, Neal Stephenson, Picturephone, profit motive, QR code, remote working, social distancing, statistical model, TED Talk, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

And when there are market failures—when the people who most need lifesaving tools can’t afford them—then governments, nonprofits, and foundations should step in to fill the gap, often by finding the right way to work with the private sector. We can do better next time—if we start taking pandemic preparation seriously. The world responded to COVID faster and more effectively than to any other disease in history. But as the late educator and physician Hans Rosling put it, “Things can be better and bad.” In the Better column, for example, I’d put the fact that the world developed safe, effective vaccines in record time. In the Bad column, I’d put the fact that too few people in poor countries are getting them. I’ll return to this problem in Chapter 8. Another entry in the Bad column so far: the world’s failure to get serious about preparing for and trying to prevent pandemics.

It’s another challenge entirely to avoid creating a system of vaccine haves and have-nots—to make and distribute enough doses to quickly reach everyone who needs them, including people in low-income countries who have a high risk of getting severely sick. The distribution of COVID vaccines in 2020 and 2021 was, to quote Hans Rosling again, both bad and better. Vaccines reached more people faster than any other vaccination effort ever. They also reached many people in poor countries faster than ever—but not fast enough. So we’ll look at ways to distribute vaccines more fairly. In the U.S., people lined up in cars at predetermined locations to get their vaccines, while many people in rural parts of low- and middle-income countries had to wait for limited doses to be delivered on foot.

It just seems like common sense that if more children survive, the global population will increase faster. In fact, I used to worry about this problem myself. But I was wrong. The answer is, emphatically and without a doubt, no—lower rates of child mortality do not lead to overpopulation. The best explanation of why this is true was given by my friend Hans Rosling. I first became aware of Hans when he gave an unforgettable TED talk in 2006 called “The Best Stats You’ve Ever Seen.”[*3] Hans had spent decades working in public health, with a focus on poor countries, and he used his talk to share some surprising facts about how health was improving around the world.


pages: 145 words: 41,453

You Are What You Read by Jodie Jackson

Brexit referendum, delayed gratification, Filter Bubble, framing effect, Future Shock, Hans Rosling, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, race to the bottom, Rutger Bregman, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, yellow journalism

It is because these three criteria have come to dominate the way in which most news stories are created that our thinking about the state of the world has become distorted. The prevalence and pursuit of extraordinarily negative stories in the press can give the appearance that we are going backwards, and most of us are left believing that the world is getting worse. Hans Rosling, a Swedish statistician and renowned public speaker, founded an organisation called Gapminder with his son Ola Rosling and Ola’s wife Anna, which addresses the negative news bias. In Hans’ inspiring and insightful TED Talk ‘The best stats you’ve ever seen’, he shares the results of an original study he conducted among Swedish university students called ‘the chimpanzee test’.10 In this experiment, he offered the students five pairs of countries, consisting of one Asian country and one European country, and asked them to select which performed better on a number of health measures, such as child mortality rates.

., ‘On newspaper headlines as relevance optimizers’, Journal of Pragmatics, 35(5), 2003, pp. 695–721. 8 Association for Safe International Road Travel, 2018, Road Safety Facts, available at: https://www.asirt.org/road-safety-facts/ 9 ASN News, 2018, ‘ASN data show 2017 was safest year in aviation history’, available at: https://news.aviation-safety.net/2017/12/30/preliminary-asn-data-show-2017-safest-year-aviation-history/ 10 Rosling, H., ‘The best stats you’ve ever seen’, Ted.com, 2018, available at: https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen 11 Patterson, T., The Vanishing Voter, Vintage, New York, 2003, p. 93. BAD NEWS SELLS Bad news sells because the amygdala is always looking for something to fear. — Peter H. Diamandis Negative news reporting and highlighting problems is vital in helping society improve.

Media Books: The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity by Steven Pinker Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now by Alan Rusbridger Broadcasting Happiness: The Science of Igniting and Sustaining Positive Change by Michelle Gielan Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress by Steven Pinker Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – And Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling, with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund A Force for Good: How the American News Media Have Propelled Positive Change by Rodger Streitmatter The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption by Clay A. Johnson It’s Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear by Gregg Easterbrook Journalism of Outrage: Investigative Reporting and Agenda Building in America by David L.


pages: 376 words: 101,759

Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid by Meredith. Angwin

airline deregulation, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, congestion pricing, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Brooks, decarbonisation, demand response, distributed generation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, green new deal, Hans Rosling, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jones Act, Just-in-time delivery, load shedding, market clearing, Michael Shellenberger, Negawatt, off-the-grid, performance metric, plutocrats, renewable energy credits, rolling blackouts, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, the map is not the territory, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, washing machines reduced drudgery, zero-sum game

Rosen, “Inside the Haywire World of Beirut’s Electricity Brokers,” Wired, August 29, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/beruit-electricity-brokers/. 230 Robert Bryce, A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations, Public Affairs, March 10, 2020, https://www.amazon.com/Question-Power-Electricity-Wealth-Nations/dp/1610397495. 231 Gayathri Vaidyanathan, “Coal Trumps Solar in India,” ClimateWire, October 19, 2015; reprinted in Scientific American, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-trumps-solar-in-india/#googDisableSync/. 232 Hans Rosling, “The magic washing machine” (video), TED, December 2010, https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_machine?language=en. 233 https://www.iso-ne.com/committees/industry-collaborations/consumer-liaison. 234 “Consumer Liaison Group Meeting Summary: December 6, 2018,” ISO-NE, undated, https://www.iso-ne.com/static-assets/documents/2018/12/clg_meeting_summary_december_6_2018_final.pdf. 235 “Consumer Liaison Group Meeting Summary: September 20, 2018,” ISO-NE, undated, https://www.iso-ne.com/static-assets/documents/2018/10/clg_meeting_summary_september_20_2018_final.pdf. 236 List of countries by electricity consumption, Wikipedia, updated April 6, 2020 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_consumption 237 Reuters, “Germany to phase out coal by 2038 in move away from fossil fuels,” CNBC (website), January 26, 2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/26/germany-to-phase-out-coal-by-2038-in-move-away-from-fossil-fuels.html. 238 Joshua S.

People want the lights to go on. The title of Gayathri Vaidyanathan’s article in Scientific American says it all: “Coal Trumps Solar in India.” If wealthy people feel that they need to encourage very poor people not to use coal—well, those wealthy people are going to have a problem. I would recommend that they watch Hans Rosling’s wonderful video “The Magic Washing Machine,” about the different types of energy poverty.232 When you have enough electricity to run a washing machine, women become empowered. When you can run a washing machine, you have “real electricity.” And you are probably connected to the grid. Climate justice SO FAR, IN AMERICA, our distributed generation is backed up by a robust electric grid, rather than by freelance brokers.

Remember the young man in India who wanted to study in the early-morning hours before he had to go to the fields? He wanted a better life for himself, and good lighting (energy use) was going to help him achieve it. A fragile grid (sorry, no electricity early in the morning) could not help him achieve his goals. (See chapter 37 on Distributed Generation.) In his amazing book, Factfulness, Hans Rosling and his son and daughter-in-law trace the various levels of poverty and energy poverty. It shows how people’s lives get better as prosperity increases.277 Bill Gates said about this book: “One of the most important books I have ever read—an indispensable guide for thinking clearly about the world.”


pages: 264 words: 76,643

The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Nations by David Pilling

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Branko Milanovic, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, financial repression, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mortgage debt, off grid, old-boy network, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peak oil, performance metric, pez dispenser, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, science of happiness, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

Even those who have not yet clawed their way on to the bottom rung of the aspirational ladder have seen what it looks like, courtesy of the satellite television channels that beam images of a middle-class life into even the most benighted corners of the country.”14 Many Indians had graduated from what one economist called a “petitioning class” into an aspirational one.15 India’s elite had failed to grasp the changes that fifteen years of growth had wrought. It was Modi who saw how alluring and transformative economic growth could be. * * * — Not too long before he died in February 2017, I discussed the issue of growth in poor countries with Hans Rosling, a Swedish academic. Rosling was that rarest of things, a pop-star statistician.16 A master of the TED talk—in which he used dynamic bubble charts to present data, which he pointed to with a rubber hand attached to the end of a long stick—Rosling was a self-described “edutainer.” Although he objected to the term, he was also an optimist.17 He believed that poor countries were gradually closing the gap on rich Western ones, a trend that was most discernible in basic health data such as infant mortality.

For McGuire the GPI is an off-the-shelf index with a venerable history. Yet the right-wing nut job made a valid point. It is one we need to consider carefully when weighing up the pluses and minuses of indexes. Because the thing about an index is that you can put in it almost anything that takes your fancy. It is what Hans Rosling, the Swedish statistician, calls “GDP in the age of Excel.” Almost everything in the GPI is a value judgment. Booze is an example. Alcohol in moderation is counted as a positive expenditure. Who doesn’t like a glass of red wine or a beer after work? But anything above what is considered reasonable consumption is deducted from the GPI, which subtracts money spent on “binge drinking.”

Amartya Sen, “Bangladesh Ahead of India in Social Indicators,” Daily Star, February 13, 2015: www.thedailystar.net. 14. David Pilling, “India’s Congress Party Has Done Itself Out of a Job,” Financial Times, May 7, 2014: www.ft.com. 15. Rajiv Kumar of the Centre for Policy Research, Delhi. 16. Sam Roberts, “Hans Rosling, Swedish Doctor and Pop-Star Statistician, Dies at 68,” New York Times, February 9, 2017. 17. He objected because he said his observations were based merely on data. 18. When I asked him about the other 20 percent, he said, “That’s why we have public health. That’s the reason for my existence.” 19.


Presentation Zen Design: Simple Design Principles and Techniques to Enhance Your Presentations by Garr Reynolds

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, business intelligence, business process, cloud computing, cognitive load, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Hans Rosling, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, TED Talk, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra

Which graph makes it easier to determine R&D’s travel expense? 8. In which graph are the labels easier to read? 9. Which graph is easier to look at? 10. Which table allows you to see the areas of poor performance more quickly? The Future of Data Presentation One of the masters of displaying data during live presentations is Hans Rosling, a public health professor from the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden. With his amazing ability to unveil the beauty of statistics, Rosling has become a bit of a super star. His talks during the annual Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) Conferences have been seen online millions of times.

The data, he says, are like musical notes that must be played to be truly appreciated. ...few people will appreciate the music if I just show them the notes. Most of us need to listen to the music to understand how beautiful it is. But often that’s how we present statistics: we just show the notes, we don’t play the music. Hans Rosling gets involved with the data at TED 09 in Long Beach, California. Let your data speak As a presenter, what sets Rosling apart is his animation of the data. Before Gapminder, he had been using data and playing it beautifully—in fact, he was a bit of a hero in his own academic community. But it was the Gapminder software that allowed him to really connect with people—to reveal the meaning of data and tell a story to the greater public.

What was missing before was the “instrument of playing,” says Rosling. Gapminder, which allows for complex animation, provides that instrument. “In statistics we need the composers, we need people who make the instruments, and we need those who play.” Gapminder was founded in Stockholm by Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund and Hans Rosling in early 2005. Trendalyzer, the Gapminder software, makes it possible to unveil the beauty of a statistical time series by converting “boring numbers” into engaging, animated, and interactive graphics. You can use the online Trendalyzer software in the form of Gapminder World, a Web service that displays a time series of development statistics for all countries (Google acquired Trendalyzer from the Gapminder Foundation in 2006).


pages: 204 words: 58,565

Keeping Up With the Quants: Your Guide to Understanding and Using Analytics by Thomas H. Davenport, Jinho Kim

behavioural economics, Black-Scholes formula, business intelligence, business process, call centre, computer age, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, data science, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, forensic accounting, global supply chain, Gregor Mendel, Hans Rosling, hypertext link, invention of the telescope, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, longitudinal study, margin call, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Myron Scholes, Netflix Prize, p-value, performance metric, publish or perish, quantitative hedge fund, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Shiller, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, six sigma, Skype, statistical model, supply-chain management, TED Talk, text mining, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport

This list was adapted and modified from one on the IBM ManyEyes site; see http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/page/Visualization_Options.html. 7. This example is from the SAS Visual Analytics 5.1 User’s Guide, “Working with Automatic Charts,” http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/vaug/65384/ HTML/default/viewer.htm#n1xa25dv4fiyz6n1etsfkbz75ai0.htm. 8. Hans Rosling, “Stats That Reshape Your Worldview,” TED talk, February 2006, http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html. 9. While Schmitt’s group sometimes creates such videos in-house, this one was done by an external production company. 10. James Taylor, “Decision Management Systems: A Practical Guide to Using Business Rules and Predictive Analytics,” IBM Press, 2011. 11.

If the data includes, for example, “One date/time category and any number of other categories or measures,” the program will automatically generate a line chart.7 * * * Purposes and Types of Visual Analytics IF YOU WANT TO: See relationships among data points: Scatterplot: Shows the relationship between two variables on a two-dimensional grid Matrix plot: For showing relationships and frequencies for hierarchical variables Heat map: Individual values contained in a matrix are represented as colors Network diagram: Shows relationships between entities and the strengths of the paths between them Compare a set of frequencies or values, typically for one variable: Bar chart: Length of bar represents values Histogram: Type of bar chart with bars showing frequencies of data at specified intervals Bubble chart: Displays a set of numeric values as circles, with the size of the circle corresponding to the value Show the rise and fall of one variable in relation to another (typically time): Line graph: Two-dimensional graph, typically with one variable or multiple variables with standardized data values Stack graph: Line graph with filled-in areas underneath the graph, typically showing change in multiple variables; can also show change in multiple categories with different colors See the parts of a whole and how they relate to each other: Pie chart: Displays distribution of values in one variable in a pie format; percentages of each value correspond to size of slices Tree map: Visual for showing the size of values in a hierarchical variable, such as world/continents/countries/population in each country Understand data across geography: Overlaying summarized data onto geographical maps with colors, bubbles, or spikes representing different values Analyzing text frequencies: Tag cloud: A visualization of word frequencies; more frequently used words are displayed in larger type Phrase net: Shows frequencies of combinations of words used together; more frequently used words are displayed in larger type * * * The types of visual analytics listed in the worksheet are static, but visual analytics are increasingly becoming dynamic and interactive. Swedish professor Hans Rosling popularized this approach with his frequently viewed TED Talk, which used visual analytics to show the changing population health relationships between developed and developing nations over time.8 Rosling has created a website called Gapminder (www.gapminder.org) that displays many of these types of interactive visual analytics.


The Data Journalism Handbook by Jonathan Gray, Lucy Chambers, Liliana Bounegru

Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, business intelligence, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, eurozone crisis, fail fast, Firefox, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, game design, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, John Snow's cholera map, Julian Assange, linked data, machine readable, moral hazard, MVC pattern, New Journalism, openstreetmap, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Silicon Valley, social graph, Solyndra, SPARQL, text mining, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks

Or using software to find connections between hundreds of thousands of documents, as The Telegraph did with MPs’ expenses (http://tgr.ph/mps-expenses). Figure 1-1. Investigate your MP’s expenses (the Guardian) Data journalism can help a journalist tell a complex story through engaging infographics. For example, Hans Rosling’s spectacular talks on visualizing world poverty with Gapminder have attracted millions of views across the world. And David McCandless’ popular work in distilling big numbers—such as putting public spending into context, or the pollution generated and prevented by the Icelandic volcano—shows the importance of clear design at Information is Beautiful.

Bad data visualization is worse in many respects than none at all. — Aron Pilhofer, New York Times Using Motion Graphics With a tight script, well-timed animations, and clear explanations, motion graphics can serve to bring complex numbers or ideas to life, guiding your audience through the story. Hans Rosling’s video lectures are a good example of how data can come to life to tell a story on the screen. Whether or not you agree with their methodology, I also think the Economist’s Shoe-throwers’ index is a good example of using video to tell a numbers-based story. You wouldn’t, or shouldn’t, present this graphic as a static image.

UK government spending and taxation (the Guardian) After something simple (like a bar or line chart, or a pie chart), you’ll find that Google spreadsheets (which you create from the documents bit of your Google account) can create some pretty nice charts—including the animated bubbles used by Hans Rosling’s Gapminder. Unlike the charts API, you don’t need to worry about code; it’s pretty similar to making a chart in Excel, in that you highlight the data and click the chart widget. The customization options are worth exploring too; you can change colors, headings, and scales. They are pretty design-neutral, which is useful in small charts.


pages: 262 words: 66,800

Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future by Johan Norberg

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, availability heuristic, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, business climate, carbon tax, classic study, clean water, continuation of politics by other means, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, demographic transition, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Island, Hans Rosling, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, more computing power than Apollo, moveable type in China, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, open economy, place-making, Rosa Parks, sexual politics, special economic zone, Steven Pinker, telerobotics, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, very high income, working poor, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996, p. 56. 40 ‘Xiaogang Village, birthplace of rural reform, moves on’, China Development Gateway, 16 December 2008, http://en.chinagate.cn/features/rural_poverty/2008-12/16/content_16966805.htm (accessed on 21 March 2016). 2 Sanitation 1 G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2004, p. 5. 2 Ann Lindstrand, Staffan Bergström, Hans Rosling, Birgitta Rubenson, Bo Stenson and Thorild Tylleskär, Global Health: An Introductory Textbook. Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2006, p. 77. 3 WHO, The World Health Report 1995: Bridging the Future. Geneva: WHO, 1995; WHO and UNICEF, Progress on Sanitation and Drinking Water: 2015 Update and MDG Assessment.

1 George Thomas White Patrick, ‘The new optimism’, Popular Science Monthly (May 1913), p. 493. 2 Bailey 2015, p. xvii. 3 Melanie Randle and Richard Eckersley, ‘Public perceptions of future threats to humanity and different societal responses: a cross-national study’, Futures, 72 (2015), 4–16. 4 Johan Norberg, ‘Rubriker som gör oss rädda’. Timbro, 2005. 5 Hans Rosling, ‘Highlights from Ignorance Survey in the UK’, 3 November 2013, http://www.gapminder.org/news/highlights-from-ignorance-survey-in-the-uk (accessed on 22 March 2016); Gapminder, ‘The Ignorance Survey: United States’, 2013, http://www.gapminder.org/GapminderMedia/wp-uploads/Results-from-the-Ignorance-Survey-in-the-US.pdf (accessed on 12 April 2016). 6 Mark Crispin Miller, ‘It’s a crime: the economic impact of the local TV news’.

Since I started writing about globalisation and development in 2001, I have been lucky to come across, meet with and learn from several thinkers who have tirelessly presented the case that humanity solves more problems than it creates, when it gets the freedom to do so. This group includes – but is far from limited to – Ronald Bailey, Lasse Berg, Anders Bolling, Angus Deaton, Robert Fogel, Indur Goklany, Charles Kenny, Deepak Lal, Bjørn Lomborg, Deirdre McCloskey, Joel Mokyr, Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley, Max Roser, Hans Rosling, Michael Shermer and Marian Tupy. And above all, I am indebted to Julian Simon, the grand old man of development optimism. Their common denominator is not political or even philosophical, but methodological. They look at the whole building rather than just one brick, long data series rather than anecdotes.


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An Optimist's Tour of the Future by Mark Stevenson

23andMe, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, Apollo 11, augmented reality, bank run, Boston Dynamics, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon-based life, clean water, computer age, decarbonisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, Leonard Kleinrock, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nick Bostrom, off grid, packet switching, peak oil, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the scientific method, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, X Prize

The big worry is that the effects of global warming will greatly reduce our capacity to grow food as crops wither under the onslaught of rising temperatures, which is why what Bruce and Tony are doing in Australia could be staggeringly important. Ironically, one way to continue to increase food production in a sustainable way could be to return to ancient practices. But can we continue to raise food production ad infinitum as our population continues to grow? The good news is we won’t have to. The statistician Hans Rosling from Sweden’s Karolinska Institute tells a story of how many of his students wonder if keeping the poor alive is really such a good idea. ‘In a time when we know the pressures on the environment are growing, my students tell me “population growth destroys the environment so poor children may as well die.”

A recent New York Times piece by Elisabeth Rosenthal, entitled ‘New Jungles Prompt a Debate on Rain Forests,’ went so far as to suggest that for every acre of rainforest being cut down, over fifty acres of secondary forest are regrowing. That’s pretty incredible, don’t you think? It is, however, important to stress that re-grown secondary forest in no way matches up to the biodiversity lost when ancient rainforests are destroyed. This teeming metropolis I’m walking through is therefore an engine of renewal. Hans Rosling’s students are dead wrong. Those ‘poor children’ must live, move to the city and prosper – and in doing so they will, in just a few generations, stabilise the world populace while allowing many ecosystems to flourish. It’s a nice thought to have as the sun sets on the Indian Ocean. The next morning brings fresh disappointment.

TED ideas are by turns so mind-bending, hopeful, scary and entertaining that they demand to be shared. Mixing the most radical ideas with a short format means speakers need to hone their presentations, and because the Internet audience is millions there is no room for academic long-windedness. In 2007, statistician Hans Rosling (whose thoughts on population I’d considered while walking the packed streets of Malé) delivered a blistering attack on the concept of ‘developed’ versus ‘developing’ nations … and then he swallowed a sword, because sword swallowing is ‘a cultural expression that for thousands of years has inspired human beings to think beyond the obvious.’


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Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

* * * The sociologist Robert Merton identified Communalism as a cardinal scientific virtue, together with Universalism, Disinterestedness, and Organized Skepticism: CUDOS.2 Kudos indeed goes to the many scientists who shared their data in a communal spirit and responded to my queries thoroughly and swiftly. First among these is Max Roser, proprietor of the mind-expanding Our World in Data Web site, whose insight and generosity were indispensable to many discussions in part II, the section on progress. I am grateful as well to Marian Tupy of HumanProgress and to Ola Rosling and Hans Rosling of Gapminder, two other invaluable resources for understanding the state of humanity. Hans was an inspiration, and his death in 2017 a tragedy for those who are committed to reason, science, humanism, and progress. My gratitude goes as well to the other data scientists I pestered and to the institutions that collect and maintain their data: Karlyn Bowman, Daniel Cox (PRRI), Tamar Epner (Social Progress Index), Christopher Fariss, Chelsea Follett (HumanProgress), Andrew Gelman, Yair Ghitza, April Ingram (Science Heroes), Jill Janocha (Bureau of Labor Statistics), Gayle Kelch (US Fire Administration/FEMA), Alaina Kolosh (National Safety Council), Kalev Leetaru (Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone), Monty Marshall (Polity Project), Bruce Meyer, Branko Milanović (World Bank), Robert Muggah (Homicide Monitor), Pippa Norris (World Values Survey), Thomas Olshanski (US Fire Administration/FEMA), Amy Pearce (Science Heroes), Mark Perry, Therese Pettersson (Uppsala Conflict Data Program), Leandro Prados de la Escosura, Stephen Radelet, Auke Rijpma (OECD Clio Infra), Hannah Ritchie (Our World in Data), Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (Google Trends), James X.

Here is a second shocker: Almost no one knows about it. Information about human progress, though absent from major news outlets and intellectual forums, is easy enough to find. The data are not entombed in dry reports but are displayed in gorgeous Web sites, particularly Max Roser’s Our World in Data, Marian Tupy’s HumanProgress, and Hans Rosling’s Gapminder. (Rosling learned that not even swallowing a sword during a 2007 TED talk was enough to get the world’s attention.) The case has been made in beautifully written books, some by Nobel laureates, which flaunt the news in their titles—Progress, The Progress Paradox, Infinite Progress, The Infinite Resource, The Rational Optimist, The Case for Rational Optimism, Utopia for Realists, Mass Flourishing, Abundance, The Improving State of the World, Getting Better, The End of Doom, The Moral Arc, The Big Ratchet, The Great Escape, The Great Surge, The Great Convergence.32 (None was recognized with a major prize, but over the period in which they appeared, Pulitzers in nonfiction were given to four books on genocide, three on terrorism, two on cancer, two on racism, and one on extinction.)

Bear in mind that the global average is dragged down by the premature deaths from hunger and disease in the populous countries in the developing world, particularly by the deaths of infants, who mix a lot of zeroes into the average. The answer for 2015 is 71.4 years.1 How close is that to your guess? In a recent survey Hans Rosling found that less than one in four Swedes guessed that it was that high, a finding consistent with the results of other multinational surveys of opinions on longevity, literacy, and poverty in what Rosling dubbed the Ignorance Project. The logo of the project is a chimpanzee, because, as Rosling explained, “If for each question I wrote the alternatives on bananas, and asked chimpanzees in the zoo to pick the right answers, they’d have done better than the respondents.”


Beautiful Visualization by Julie Steele

barriers to entry, correlation does not imply causation, data acquisition, data science, database schema, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, global pandemic, Hans Rosling, index card, information retrieval, iterative process, linked data, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, no-fly zone, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, performance metric, power law, QR code, recommendation engine, semantic web, social bookmarking, social distancing, social graph, sorting algorithm, Steve Jobs, the long tail, web application, wikimedia commons, Yochai Benkler

Some animations can enhance the visual appeal of the visualization being presented, but may make exploration of the dataset more difficult; other animated visualizations facilitate exploration. This chapter attempts to work out a framework for designing effective animated visualizations. We’ll begin by looking at some background material, and then move on to a discussion of one of the most well-known animated visualizations, Hans Rosling’s GapMinder. One of the projects I worked on explored animated scatterplots like GapMinder; this makes a fine launching point to discuss both successes and failures with animation. As we’ll see, successful animations can display a variety of types of transformations. The DynaVis project helps illustrate how some of these transitions and transformations can work out.

Visualization was most helpful when accompanied by constructivist theories—that is, when students manipulated code or algorithms and watched a visualization that illustrated their own work, or when students were asked questions and tried to use the visualization to answer them. In contrast, animations were ineffective at transferring knowledge; passively watching an animation was not more effective than other forms of teaching. GapMinder and Animated Scatterplots One recent example of successful animated visualization comes from Hans Rosling’s GapMinder (http://www.gapminder.org). Rosling is a professor of Global Health from Sweden, and his talk at the February 2006 Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) conference[1] riveted first a live audience, then many more online. He collected public health statistics from international sources and, in his brief talk, plotted them on a scatterplot.

Washington, DC: IEEE Computer Society. Zongker, Douglas E., and David H. Salesin. 2003. ‚ÄúOn creating animated presentations.‚Äù In Proceedings of the 2003 ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation. New York: ACM Press. [1] Available online at http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html. Rosling presented similar discussions at TED 2007 and TED 2009. Chapter Twenty Visualization: Indexed. Jessica Hagy Visualization: It’s an Elephant. Visualization. To one person, it’s charts and graphs and ROI. To another, it’s illustration and colorful metaphor and gallery openings.


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Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire by Rebecca Henderson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, asset allocation, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, dark matter, decarbonisation, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, fixed income, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, growth hacking, Hans Rosling, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, means of production, meta-analysis, microcredit, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, mittelstand, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plant based meat, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, uber lyft, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WeWork, working-age population, Zipcar

Brondizio, H. T. Ngo, M. Guèze, J. Agard, A. Arneth, et al., eds., “Summary for Policymakers of the Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services” (Bonn, Germany: IPBES Secretariat, 2019). 6. Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, and Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, 1st ed. (New York, Flatiron Books, 2018). 7. WHO, “World Bank and WHO: Half the World Lacks Access to Essential Health Services, 100 Million Still Pushed into Extreme Poverty Because of Health Expenses,” Dec. 13, 2017, www.who.int/news-room/detail/13-12-2017-world-bank-and-who-half-the-world-lacks-access-to-essential-health-services-100-million-still-pushed-into-extreme-poverty-because-of-health-expenses; Kate Hodal, “Hundreds of Millions of Children in School but Not Learning,” Guardian, Feb. 2, 2018, www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/feb/02/hundreds-of-millions-of-children-in-school-but-not-learning-world-bank; United Nations, “Lack of Quality Opportunities Stalling Young People’s Quest for Decent Work—UN Report / UN News,” Nov. 21, 2017, https://news.un.org/en/story/2017/11/636812-lack-quality-opportunities-stalling-young-peoples-quest-decent-work-un-report; James Manyika et al., “Jobs Lost, Jobs Gained: Workforce Transitions in a Time of Automation,” McKinsey Global Institute (2017). 8.

CEMEX Annual Report, 2018, www.cemex.com/investors/reports/hom#navigate. 36. Climate Change, Marks and Spencer, https://corporate.marksandspencer.com/sustainability/business-wide/climate-change. 37. Key Facts, Marks and Spencer, https://corporate.marksandspencer.com/investors/key-facts. 38. Hans Rosling et al., Factfulness. 39. Alvaredo et al., World Inequality Report 2018. 40. Raj Chetty, “Improving Opportunities for Economic Mobility: New Evidence and Policy Lessons,” Bridges (Fall 2016). 41. Raj Chetty et al., Mobility Report Cards: The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility, NBER Working Paper no. w23618 (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2017). 42.

Human Development Indices and Indicators: 2018 Statistical Update (Mauritius: UNDP, 2018), http://hdr.undp.org/sites/all/themes/hdr_theme/country-notes/MUS.pdf. 93. My sources for what follows are a personal interview with Daniella conducted in August 2018, my personal experience, and Leadership Now’s website. I am on the Advisory Board of the organization. Chapter 8. Pebbles in an Avalanche of Change 1. Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, and Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, 1st ed. (New York: Flatiron Books, 2018), 33. 2. K. Danziger, “Ideology and Utopia in South Africa: A Methodological Contribution to the Sociology of Knowledge,” British Journal of Sociology 14, no. 1 (1963): 59–76. 3.


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The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness by Morgan Housel

airport security, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Madoff, book value, business cycle, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, financial engineering, financial independence, Hans Rosling, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, new economy, Paul Graham, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, stocks for the long run, tech worker, the scientific method, traffic fines, Vanguard fund, WeWork, working-age population

The simple idea that most people wake up in the morning trying to make things a little better and more productive than wake up looking to cause trouble is the foundation of optimism. It’s not complicated. It’s not guaranteed, either. It’s just the most reasonable bet for most people, most of the time. The late statistician Hans Rosling put it differently: “I am not an optimist. I am a very serious possibilist.” Now we can discuss optimism’s more compelling sibling: pessimism. December 29th, 2008. The worst year for the economy in modern history is about to close. Stock markets around the world had collapsed. The global financial system was on day-to-day life support.

If, on the other hand, you say catastrophe is imminent, you may expect a McArthur genius award or even the Nobel Peace Prize. In my own adult lifetime ... the fashionable reasons for pessimism changed, but the pessimism was constant. “Every group of people I ask thinks the world is more frightening, more violent, and more hopeless—in short, more dramatic—than it really is,” Hans Rosling wrote in his book Factfulness. When you realize how much progress humans can make during a lifetime in everything from economic growth to medical breakthroughs to stock market gains to social equality, you would think optimism would gain more attention than pessimism. And yet. The intellectual allure of pessimism has been known for ages.


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How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need by Bill Gates

agricultural Revolution, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, fear of failure, Ford Model T, global pandemic, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of air conditioning, Louis Pasteur, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, negative emissions, oil shock, performance metric, plant based meat, purchasing power parity, risk tolerance, social distancing, Solyndra, systems thinking, TED Talk, the built environment, the High Line, urban planning, yield management

As for the ideas you can’t support, you may feel compelled to speak out, and that’s understandable. But I hope you’ll spend more time and energy supporting whatever you’re in favor of than opposing whatever you’re against. With the threat of climate change upon us, it can be hard to be hopeful about the future. But as my friend Hans Rosling, the late global health advocate and educator, wrote in his amazing book Factfulness: “When we have a fact-based worldview, we can see that the world is not as bad as it seems—and we can see what we have to do to keep making it better.” When we have a fact-based view of climate change, we can see that we have some of the things we need to avoid a climate disaster, but not all of them.

Chapter 11: A Plan for Getting to Zero The project took 13 years: Human Genome Project Information Archive, “Potential Benefits of HGP Research,” web.ornl.gov. An independent study: Simon Tripp and Martin Grueber, “Economic Impact of the Human Genome Project,” Battelle Memorial Institute, www.battelle.org. Chapter 12: What Each of Us Can Do “When we have a fact-based worldview”: Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better than You Think, with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund (New York: Flatiron Books, 2018), 255. Afterword: Climate Change and COVID-19 Black people and Latinx people: “Race, Ethnicity, and Age Trends in Persons Who Died from COVID-19—United States, May–August 2020,” U.S.


pages: 280 words: 83,299

Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline by Darrell Bricker, John Ibbitson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, off grid, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban planning, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

The Economist is also skeptical of the UN estimates: previous projections, it observed in a 2014 analysis, failed to forecast “the spectacular declines in fertility in Bangladesh or Iran since 1980 (in both countries, from roughly six children per woman to about two now). At the moment, Africa is the source of much new population growth and the authors assume that fertility rates will continue to fall more slowly there than they did in Asia and Latin America. But no one can be sure.”82 The Swedish statistician Hans Rosling founded the Gapminder Institute to spread knowledge of great demographic shifts underway using language the general public can understand. In one popular video, “Don’t Panic,” he tells the audience that “mankind already is doing better than many of you think.”83 He talks about the convergence of birth rates and life expectancy between developed and developing countries, noting, “We no longer live in a divided world.”

All current and projected population and fertility data in this book is drawn from this source unless otherwise noted. 80 Wolfgang Lutz interview with Darrell Bricker, 15 April 2016. 81 Tedx Talks, “We Won’t Be Nine Billion: Jørgen Randers at TEDx Maastricht,” YouTube, 11 May 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73X8R9NrX3w 82 “Don’t Panic,” Economist, 24 September 2014. 83 Gapminder Foundation, “Don’t Panic: Hans Rosling Showing the Facts About Population,” YouTube, 15 December, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E 84 “World Population to Peak by 2055: Report,” cnbc, 9 September 2013. http://www.cnbc.com/id/101018722 85 “The Astounding Drop in Global Fertility Rates Between 1970 and 2014,” Brilliant Maps, 23 June 2015. http://brilliantmaps.com/fertility-rates 86 “Margaret Sanger’s the Woman Rebel—One Hundred Years Old,” Margaret Sanger Papers Project (New York: New York University, 2014). https://sangerpapers.wordpress.com/2014/03/20/margaret-sangers-the -woman-rebel-100-years-old 87 OECD Health Statistics 2014: How Does Spain Compare?


pages: 524 words: 155,947

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

In 1970, US per capita income was 20 times that of China; by 2010, the ratio was only 4.11 Of course, there are still too many people dying too early, and too many living in extreme poverty, or close to it. But things have in general been getting better. In the book he wrote with his son and daughter-in-law, the late Hans Rosling described 13 questions he often asked at global conferences.12 Most people were too pessimistic in their answers, not realising, for example, that 60% of girls in low-income countries now finish primary school, 80% of children have been vaccinated, and 80% of people have access to electricity.

“Worst tech predictions of all time”, The Daily Telegraph, June 29th 2017, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/0/worst-tech-predictions-of-all-time/thomas-watson-ibm-president-in-1943/ 7. Vaclav Smil, Energy and Civilization: A History 8. https://www.tudorsociety.com/childbirth-in-medieval-and-tudor-times-by-sarah-bryson 9. Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress 10. Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – And Why Things Are Better Than You Think 11. Ibid.; the figures comes from a World Bank study by Martin Ravallion and Shaohua Chen 12. Joe Hasell and Max Roser, “Famines”, Our World in Data, https://ourworldindata.org/famines 13.

The Story of Land: A World History of Land Tenure and Agrarian Reform, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 1988 Prawdin, Michael The Mongol Empire: Its Rise and Legacy, George Allen & Unwin, 1967 Pye, Michael The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us, Pegasus Books, 2016 Radelet, Steven: The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World, Simon & Schuster, 2016 Razzell, Peter, and Spence, Christine “Social capital and the history of mortality in Britain”, International Journal of Epidemiology, vol. 34, no. 2, 2005 Read, Charles “British economic policy and Ireland c. 1841–1845”, unpublished University of Cambridge PhD thesis, 2017 Reid, Michael Forgotten Continent: The Battle for Latin America’s Soul, Yale University Press, 2007 Rhodes, Richard Energy: A Human History, Simon & Schuster, 2018 Romer, Paul “Increasing returns and long-term growth”, Journal of Political Economy, vol. 94, no. 5, 1986 Ronson, Jon So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, Picador, 2015 Rosenberg, Nathan Exploring the Black Box: Technology, Economics, and History, Cambridge University Press, 1994 Rosling, Hans, Rosling, Ola, and Rosling Rönnlund, Anna Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – And Why Things Are Better Than You Think, Sceptre, 2018 Russell, Andrew L. “Standardization in history: a review essay with an eye to the future”, Johns Hopkins University, http://arussell.org/papers/futuregeneration-russell.pdf Sampson, Anthony The Seven Sisters: The Great Oil Companies and the World They Made, Hodder & Stoughton, 1975 Scheidel, Walter The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century, Princeton University Press, 2017 Schofer, Evan, and Meyer, John W.


pages: 442 words: 94,734

The Art of Statistics: Learning From Data by David Spiegelhalter

Abraham Wald, algorithmic bias, Anthropocene, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Bayesian statistics, Brexit referendum, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, computer vision, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Edmond Halley, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, government statistician, Gregor Mendel, Hans Rosling, Higgs boson, Kenneth Rogoff, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, Netflix Prize, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, p-value, placebo effect, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, replication crisis, self-driving car, seminal paper, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, sugar pill, systematic bias, TED Talk, The Design of Experiments, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Two Sigma

Figure 2.10 Infographic based on data from the third UK National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal-3) – the lesson from the data is pointed out both visually and verbally. Even more advanced are dynamic graphics, in which movement can be used to reveal patterns in the changes over time. The master of this technique was Hans Rosling, whose TED talks and videos set a new standard of storytelling with statistics, for example by showing the relationship between changing wealth and health through the animated movement of bubbles representing each country’s progress from 1800 to the present day. Rosling used his graphics to try to correct misconceptions about the distinction between ‘developed’ and ‘undeveloped’ countries, with the dynamic plots revealing that, over time, almost all countries moved steadily along a common path towards greater health and prosperity.fn149 This chapter has demonstrated a continuum from simple descriptions and plots of raw data, through to complex examples of storytelling with statistics.

World Health Organization. Q&A on the carcinogenicity of the consumption of red meat and processed meat is at http://www.who.int/features/qa/cancer-red-meat/en/. ‘Bacon, Ham and Sausages Have the Same Cancer Risk as Cigarettes Warn Experts’, Daily Record, 23 October 2015. 5. This was a favourite observation of Hans Rosling – see next chapter. 6. E. A. Akl et al., ‘Using Alternative Statistical Formats for Presenting Risks and Risk Reductions’, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 3 (2011). 7. ‘Statins Can Weaken Muscles and Joints: Cholesterol Drug Raises Risk of Problems by up to 20 per cent’, Mail Online, 3 June 2013.


pages: 372 words: 94,153

More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next by Andrew McAfee

back-to-the-land, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, DeepMind, degrowth, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, humanitarian revolution, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Landlord’s Game, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, Mikhail Gorbachev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, precision agriculture, price elasticity of demand, profit maximization, profit motive, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, telepresence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Veblen good, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, World Values Survey

The first is that it contains a lot of valuable information. The second is that it tells an invaluable story—an optimistic and hopeful one. The evidence presented in Our World in Data and in books like Julian Simon’s The Ultimate Resource, Bjørn Lomborg’s Skeptical Environmentalist, Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now, and Hans Rosling’s Factfulness shows clearly that most of the things we should care about are getting better. Not all, but most. This happy fact applies both to the state of nature and the human condition. The Power of Negative Thinking But do your friends and family believe that a lot of important things are getting better?

By 2014, the figure had dropped to less than 15 percent: Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, “Global Rise of Education,” Our World in Data, August 31, 2016, https://ourworldindata.org/global-rise-of-education. Chapter 11: Getting So Much Better “But in online polls, in most countries, fewer than 10 percent of people knew this”: Hans Rosling, “Good News at Last: The World Isn’t as Horrific as You Think,” Guardian, April 11, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2018/apr/11/good-news-at-last-the-world-isnt-as-horrific-as-you-think. Across all countries surveyed in 2017, only 20 percent of people correctly answered: “Most of Us Are Wrong about How the World Has Changed (Especially Those Who Are Pessimistic about the Future),” Our World in Data, accessed March 25, 2019, https://ourworldindata.org/wrong-about-the-world.


pages: 404 words: 92,713

The Art of Statistics: How to Learn From Data by David Spiegelhalter

Abraham Wald, algorithmic bias, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Bayesian statistics, Brexit referendum, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, computer vision, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Edmond Halley, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, government statistician, Gregor Mendel, Hans Rosling, Higgs boson, Kenneth Rogoff, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, Netflix Prize, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, p-value, placebo effect, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, replication crisis, self-driving car, seminal paper, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, sugar pill, systematic bias, TED Talk, The Design of Experiments, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Two Sigma

Figure 2.10 Infographic based on data from the third UK National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal-3)—the lesson from the data is pointed out both visually and verbally. Even more advanced are dynamic graphics, in which movement can be used to reveal patterns in the changes over time. The master of this technique was Hans Rosling, whose TED talks and videos set a new standard of storytelling with statistics, for example by showing the relationship between changing wealth and health through the animated movement of bubbles representing each country’s progress from 1800 to the present day. Rosling used his graphics to try to correct misconceptions about the distinction between ‘developed’ and ‘undeveloped’ countries, with the dynamic plots revealing that, over time, almost all countries moved steadily along a common path towards greater health and prosperity.*9 This chapter has demonstrated a continuum from simple descriptions and plots of raw data, through to complex examples of storytelling with statistics.

World Health Organization. Q&A on the carcinogenicity of the consumption of red meat and processed meat is at http://www.who.int/features/qa/cancer-red-meat/en/. ‘Bacon, Ham and Sausages Have the Same Cancer Risk as Cigarettes Warn Experts’, Daily Record, 23 October 2015. 5. This was a favourite observation of Hans Rosling—see next chapter. 6. E. A. Akl et al., ‘Using Alternative Statistical Formats for Presenting Risks and Risk Reductions’, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 3 (2011). 7. ‘Statins Can Weaken Muscles and Joints: Cholesterol Drug Raises Risk of Problems by up to 20 per cent’, Mail Online, 3 June 2013.


pages: 552 words: 168,518

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World by Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, buy and hold, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collaborative editing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, demographic transition, digital capitalism, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fault tolerance, financial innovation, Galaxy Zoo, game design, global village, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, hive mind, Home mortgage interest deduction, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, medical bankruptcy, megacity, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, oil shock, old-boy network, online collectivism, open borders, open economy, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, scientific mainstream, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social web, software patent, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, value at risk, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, young professional, Zipcar

Some changes, like the relationship between health and GDP, are so gradual that they’re nearly imperceptible to us. Animating nearly two hundred years’ worth of data depicting the relationship between infant mortality rates and GDP per capita in a forty-five-second clip is much more revealing than a static chart, says Professor Hans Rosling, the creator of Trendalyzer, a tool that allows users to turn spreadsheet data into rich, interactive visualizations on the Web.16 If you present the same data set without animation, just using “before” and “after” graphs, people somehow disbelieve it, says Rosling. These animations don’t tell a story: they’re “story busters,” because they correctly convey the richness and diversity of the data without oversimplifying.

Proenza, University of Akron; Jordan Raddick, Johns Hopkins University; Saad Rafi, Ontario Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure; Chris Rasmussen, U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency; Ben Rattray, Change.org; Michael Reinicke, Rideshare; Steve Ressler, GovLoop; David Rich, WRI; Ben Rigby, the Extraordinaries; Jay Rogers, Local Motors; Bruce Rogow, IT Odyssey; Mechthild Rohen, European Commission; Hans Rosling, Trendalyzer; Adam Roth-well, Intelligent Giving; John Gerard Ruggie, Harvard University; Charles Sabel, Columbia University; Rick Samans, World Economic Forum; Saskia Sassen, Columbia University; Kevin Schawinski, Yale University; Eric Schmidt, Google; Henrik Schuermann, CoreMedia; Brent Schulkin, Virgance; Klaus Schwab, WEF; Eddie Schwartz, Songwriters Association of Canada; Zuhairah Scott; Peggy Sheehy, Suffern Middle School; George Siemens, Connectivism; Anne Hojer Simonsen, Danish Ministry of Climate and Energy; Larry Smarr, Calit2; Marco Smit, Health 2.0; Kirsi Sormunen, Nokia; Dwayne Spradlin, InnoCentive; Soren Stamer, CoreMedia; Tom Steinberg, mySociety; Robert Stephens, Best Buy; Unity Stoakes, Organized Wisdom; Susanne Stormer, Novo Nordisk; Val Stoyanov, Cisco; Tomer Strolight, Torstar Digital; Anant Sudarshan, Stanford University; David Ticoll, author; Bill Tipton, HP; Michael Toffel, MapEcos; Linus Torvalds, Linux Foundation; Lena Trudeau, NAPA; Mike Turillo, Spencer Trask Collaborative Innovations; Wood Turner, Climate Counts; Gentry Underwood, IDEO; Jim Walker, Virtual Alabama; David Wheeler, CARMA; Dennis Whittle, Global Giving; John Wilbanks, Creative Commons; Sean Wise, VenCorps; Dave Witzel, Environmental Defense Fund; John Wonderlich, SunlightFoundation; Nicole Wong, Google; Jon Worren, MaRS; Doug Wright, RiffWorld; Nick Yee, Palo Alto Research Center; Jim Zemlin, Linux Foundation Thank you The title of the book came from a challenge we conducted online that showed there is indeed wisdom in crowds.

Nothhaft and David Kline, “The Biggest Job Creator You Never Heard Of: The Patent Office,” Harvard Business Review Blog (May 6, 2010). 13. Liz Allen, “Your chance to participate in Patent review—Peer to Patent needs you,” Public Library of Science (November 11, 2007). 14. Tom Steinberg, Ed Mayo, “Digital Engagement”, The Power of Information Task Force (2007). 15. Ibid. 16. Professor Hans Rosling, “New insights on poverty and life around the world,” TED (March 2007). See: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/140. 17. “About,” MapEcos.org (accessed May 19, 2010). 18. In most countries, the public sector is encumbered by complex institutional legacies that encompass hundreds of separate departments across multiple levels of government.


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Do Improvise: Less push. More pause. Better results. A new approach to work (and life) (Do Books) by Poynton, Robert

Berlin Wall, complexity theory, Gene Kranz, Hans Rosling, iterative process, off grid, Skype, TED Talk, Toyota Production System

Using the Audience Requirements Grid is a way to keep you away from that edge. I don’t mean to say that the role of content in a presentation is irrelevant. Good slides can lift things and great material can, occasionally, carry the day. For example, there is a magnificent TED talk (see www.ted.com) by statistician Hans Rosling whose animated visualisation of data is stunning. But these animations were the result of decades of work. And, realising that there is more to presentations than good data, at the end, Rosling strips off to reveal a spandex vest and goes on to swallow a sword (or to be more accurate, a 19th-century Swedish infantry bayonet).


pages: 426 words: 117,027

Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought by Barbara Tversky

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, clean water, cognitive load, continuous integration, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, fundamental attribution error, Hans Rosling, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Snow's cholera map, Lao Tzu, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, natural language processing, neurotypical, patient HM, Richard Feynman, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the new new thing, theory of mind, urban planning

Yet thinking about subtle gradations along dimensions is much harder than lumping things into gross categories; there’s so much more that has to be considered and kept in mind. Categories are easier on the mind. But beware the First Law of Cognition, benefits come with costs. The beloved physician and professor of global health at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, Hans Rosling, was dismayed by the many misconceptions people, even distinguished political and economic leaders of the world, had about the state of the world. His TED talk, telling the dramatic story of world economic development in recent times as if it were an ongoing tight soccer match, went viral. Many of the misconceptions that people held about economic and social development came from categorical thinking, especially dividing the world into rich and poor.

Palanquins transported nobility; commoners were transported on the shoulders or arms of family or in wheelbarrows or sleds. Horses, camels, donkeys, dogs, and reindeer took our premotorized ancestors farther distances than their feet could. Now strollers and wheelchairs and scooters and skates and planes and rockets do those jobs. Recall Hans Rosling’s work: the key to jumping up an economic level is moving farther in the world. At level one, you only have your feet. To get to level two, you need a bicycle; to get from level two to three, a motor scooter; to reach level four, an automobile. Moving farther in the world brings far more than economic opportunity.


pages: 573 words: 115,489

Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow by Tim Jackson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, biodiversity loss, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, business cycle, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, critique of consumerism, David Graeber, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hans Rosling, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, Philip Mirowski, Post-Keynesian economics, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, secular stagnation, short selling, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, Works Progress Administration, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Mean years of schooling are taken from the Human Development Indicator database; GDP per capita from the World Development Indicators database (see Chapter 1, note 13). 22 There are some wonderful recent developments in this field of study, in particular Hans Rosling’s interactive GAPMINDER project, online at www.gapminder.org. See also Rosling’s TED talk, online at www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen (accessed 25 January 2016). 23 See Stuckler and Basu (2014) for a thorough exploration of the health implications of different responses to economic hardship. 24 Time series data on life expectancy for individual countries are from the World Development Indicators database (series SP.DYN.LE00.IN). 25 Franco et al. (2007: 1374). 26 Stuckler and Basu (2014: 108 et seq.). 27 In the conventional model, resources are often excluded from the equation and the main dependencies are thought to be on labour, capital and technological innovation. 28 Aggregate demand refers to the ‘expenditure’ formulation of the GDP, namely the sum of private and public consumption plus business investment.


pages: 399 words: 118,576

Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older Without Getting Old by Andrew Steele

Alfred Russel Wallace, assortative mating, bioinformatics, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clockwatching, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, CRISPR, dark matter, deep learning, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Easter island, epigenetics, Hans Rosling, Helicobacter pylori, life extension, lone genius, megastructure, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, parabiotic, Peter Thiel, phenotype, precautionary principle, radical life extension, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, stealth mode startup, stem cell, TED Talk, zero-sum game

(American Psychological Association, 2011) ageless.link/ufntz3 … age-related diseases … around the world This was calculated using WHO GBD statistics. You can see the calculation at ageless.link/hbzze7 … surveys show … state of the world … Our general state of pessimism about the world – from life expectancy, to education, to vaccine provision – is captured beautifully by the brilliant Hans Rosling’s Ignorance Survey. Hans Rosling, ‘Highlights from ignorance survey in the UK’ (Gapminder Foundation, 2013) ageless.link/4qppjz … a breakthrough that changed scientific history Clive M. McCay, Mary F. Crowell and L. A. Maynard, ‘The effect of retarded growth upon the length of life span and upon the ultimate body size’, J.


Beautiful Data: The Stories Behind Elegant Data Solutions by Toby Segaran, Jeff Hammerbacher

23andMe, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, bioinformatics, Black Swan, business intelligence, card file, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, data science, database schema, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fault tolerance, Firefox, Gregor Mendel, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, information retrieval, lake wobegon effect, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, machine readable, machine translation, Mars Rover, natural language processing, openstreetmap, Paradox of Choice, power law, prediction markets, profit motive, semantic web, sentiment analysis, Simon Singh, social bookmarking, social graph, SPARQL, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, supply-chain management, systematic bias, TED Talk, text mining, the long tail, Vernor Vinge, web application

At the research level, articles in political science journals are starting to make use of graphical techniques for discovery and presentation of results. And online tools ranging from NationMaster.com to the Name Voyager (http://www. babynamewizard.com/voyager) are becoming increasingly accessible, with data dumps such as Hans Rosling’s TED talk (http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_ stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html) becoming cult favorites. We expect statistical visualization to become more important and more widespread in political analysis. References Bertin, J. (1967). Semiology of Graphics. Translated by W. J. Berg (1983). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.


pages: 1,324 words: 159,290

Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made by Vaclav Smil

8-hour work day, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Boeing 747, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, energy transition, European colonialism, Extinction Rebellion, Ford Model T, garden city movement, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, peak oil, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, power law, precision agriculture, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, Skype, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, working-age population

The first, a relatively restrained version of these views, is one of an ever-better world, of promises that the coming generations will see many repeats of our recent accomplishments, replete with monotonously improving health, rising life expectancies, higher incomes, ever greater surfeits of food and energy, even more affordable mobility, and an even easier access to information—and all of that would be taking place with ever lower impact on the environment. This is the message of the two much acclaimed publications by Hans Rosling and Steven Pinker (Rosling et al. 2018; Pinker 2018). The authors have followed the same basic precept that I did in this book and in other writings since the year 2000 (most notably in Smil 2005, 2006, 2010a, 2013b, 2014, 2017a, and 2020). All of us have assessed many remarkable historic achievements and appraised the current state of modern civilization by focusing on facts and numbers, past and present.

All of us have pointed out many impressive quality-of-life gains and stunning technical accomplishments in order to explain—contrary to ubiquitous news headlines reporting on a variety of depressing problems and the writings about imminent peaks, downturns, and catastrophes—how so much has gone steadily and impressively better. In his Factfulness Hans Rosling (2018) argued that even well-informed people are getting “the basic facts about the world wrong,” that “the world is getting worse” is “the mega misconception,” that “things are better than you think.” Steven Pinker (2018, 77) admonished us to follow trend lines, not the headlines, and recited numerous quality-of-life gains ranging from longevity and reduction of poverty to the diffusion of democratic governance.


pages: 216 words: 61,061

Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed by Alexis Ohanian

Airbnb, barriers to entry, carbon-based life, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, Hacker News, Hans Rosling, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Occupy movement, Paul Graham, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social web, software is eating the world, Startup school, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, unpaid internship, Wayback Machine, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Forty-two slides—a good sign,3 even though it meant I had only a little more than four seconds for each slide. There was going to be a giant TED sign on the stage behind me. This could make or break my public speaking career. And I was going to be on the same stage where the brilliant statistician Hans Rosling, using beautiful data, emphatically demonstrated how India ascended to economic superpower status—meanwhile, I was going to talk about a whale named Mister Splashy Pants. No pressure. I finished before sunrise and took a power nap. When I awoke I began feverishly practicing with my timer. I missed all the morning talks.


pages: 287 words: 62,824

Just Keep Buying: Proven Ways to Save Money and Build Your Wealth by Nick Maggiulli

Airbnb, asset allocation, Big Tech, bitcoin, buy and hold, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, diversification, diversified portfolio, financial independence, Hans Rosling, index fund, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Seder, lifestyle creep, mass affluent, mortgage debt, oil shock, payday loans, phenotype, price anchoring, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Sam Altman, side hustle, side project, stocks for the long run, The 4% rule, time value of money, transaction costs, very high income, William Bengen, yield curve

Heart size was a better predictor of horse racing ability than anything else. And this is what Seder knew when he convinced his buyer to purchase American Pharoah and disregard the other 151 horses at auction. The rest is history. Seder’s story highlights how deep insight can be gleaned from one useful data point. Hans Rosling echoes this sentiment in Factfulness when he discusses the importance of child mortality in understanding a country’s development: “Do you know I’m obsessed with the number for the child mortality rate?… Because children are very fragile. There are so many things that can kill them. When only 14 children die out of 1,000 in Malaysia, this means that the other 986 survive.


pages: 1,205 words: 308,891

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World by Deirdre N. McCloskey

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, Akira Okazaki, antiwork, behavioural economics, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, British Empire, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Costa Concordia, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, crony capitalism, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, Ford Model T, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, George Akerlof, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Harrison: Longitude, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, land reform, liberation theology, lone genius, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, open economy, out of africa, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, Pier Paolo Pasolini, pink-collar, plutocrats, positional goods, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, rent control, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, very high income, wage slave, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yogi Berra

For example, the lower end of the world’s present income distribution, the bottom billion out of seven, as Ó Gráda has documented, has seen a dramatic decline of famine.4 In the European Middle Ages a killing famine in the favored south of England came every ten years or so.5 The last widespread, killing famine in southern England was 1597, in northern England 1623, in Scotland the 1690s, in France 1710, in Germany, Scandinavia, and Switzerland 1770–1772, in Ireland the late 1840s, in Finland 1866–1868.6 The upper middle of the present-day seven billion—perhaps two billion, double the population of the world in 1800—live in countries in the mold of Greece or Taiwan or Israel. The average income of such places exceeds $80 a day, which is to say two and a half times the present world average, and twenty-six times the world average in 1800. Hans Rosling, a Swedish professor of public health, calls $80 “the Washing Line,” because at that level a household can have an electric washing machine, freeing women from exhausting wash days.7 Deborah Fallows reports on a study of material aspirations among the upper bourgeoisie in China: “In the 1950s and 1960s . . . a watch, a bicycle, and a sewing machine.

Italy in its legal system ranked sixty-third, just above Iran, and in its freedom from regulation ninety-fourth, just above the Dominican Republic.9 Italian legal institutions, the exercise of the monopoly of legitimate violence—its L variables and the S variables supporting the L—are wretched. Yet in real GDP per person New Zealand and Italy, in 2010, were nearly identical, at $88.20 and $86.80 a day, a little above Hans Rosling’s Washing Line. One could argue that there is anyway an international correlation between income and governance. But the causation is in part the other way around—rich people demand better governance, which is certainly the story of more honest governance in American cities, 1900 to the present.

Shils 1957, p. 490: the ex-Marxists “criticize the aesthetic qualities of a society which has realized so much of what socialists once claimed was of central importance, which has, in other words, overcome poverty and long arduous labor.” 13. Ehrlich 1968 (1975), p. xi. 14. If you disbelieve it, you need to listen to Hans Rosling’s astonishing video for the BBC, I say again: “Don’t Panic—The Facts about Population,” http://www.gapminder.org/videos/dont-panic-the-facts-about-population/. 15. Amazon.com reviews of Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2, accessed July 2013. 16. Eldridge 1995, p. 9. Such mistaken science comes from the English-language notion that the only “sciences” are physical and biological.


pages: 295 words: 87,204

The Capitalist Manifesto by Johan Norberg

AltaVista, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, failed state, Filter Bubble, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Indoor air pollution, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, Minecraft, multiplanetary species, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, open economy, passive income, Paul Graham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, planned obsolescence, precariat, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sam Bankman-Fried, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, social distancing, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Virgin Galactic, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey, X Prize, you are the product, zero-sum game

Or as Sweden’s archbishop summarized the state of the world: ‘our journey leads straight to hell’.2 In contrast, I talked about the strangely unheralded progress that I saw in poor countries that had begun to liberalize their economies, which now had better incomes, agricultural production, nutrition, health, vaccination and education. It was not easy to get such information back then. For some strange reason, tax-funded international organizations still preferred to keep secret the data they had collected. It was four years before Gapminder was founded and Hans Rosling began to fill the gaps in our knowledge about world progress in a fun and easily accessible way, and ten years before Max Roser started Our World in Data, which compiles an incredible amount of user-friendly statistics.3 But what I did find was enough to impress me and completely change the worldview I grew up with.


pages: 294 words: 96,661

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity by Byron Reese

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, basic income, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cognitive bias, computer age, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, dark matter, DeepMind, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, estate planning, financial independence, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, full employment, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Hargreaves, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, lateral thinking, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Lou Jepsen, Moravec's paradox, Nick Bostrom, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, OpenAI, pattern recognition, profit motive, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Timothy McVeigh, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

And culture is why we have William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” Michelangelo Buonarroti’s Pietà, J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. We have come a long way on our pathway to civilization. Yet our journey is far from complete. As the Swedish doctor Hans Rosling said, “You have to be able to hold two ideas in your head at once: the world is getting better and it’s not good enough.” While it takes but a few moments to make a list of the appalling atrocities and injustices that plague our world, most generations do leave the world a little better of a place than they found it.


There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years by Mike Berners-Lee

air freight, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cloud computing, dematerialisation, disinformation, driverless car, Easter island, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, fake news, food miles, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jevons paradox, land reform, microplastics / micro fibres, negative emissions, neoliberal agenda, off grid, performance metric, post-truth, profit motive, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, urban planning

We all recognise that happiness, meaning, and thriving depend on far more than material consumption.’ 22 BT’s procurement guidelines in regards to climate change can be found here: https://groupextranet.bt.com/selling2bt/ working/climateChange/default.html They also outline their environmental principles here: https://www.btplc.com/Purposefulbusiness/Ourapproach/ Ourpolicies/Environmental_Policy.pdf 6 People and Work 1 See, for example, the late Swedish statistician Hans Rosling’s entertaining and striking TED talks on population, health 268 NOTES TO PAGES 150–154 and wealth trends. Highly recommended, if you haven’t seen them already. Very sadly he died in 2017. https://tinyurl .com/roslinghans 2 Stewart Wallis, former head of the New Econmomics Foundation, and before that International Director of Oxfam, estimates that this alone can cut the fertility rate by a massive 60%, making it, in his view one of the world’s most critical investments on three simultaneous fronts: morally, socially and environmentally.


pages: 384 words: 93,754

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism by John Elkington

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, anti-fragile, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, deglobalization, degrowth, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Future Shock, Gail Bradbrook, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, impact investing, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, John Elkington, Jony Ive, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, microplastics / micro fibres, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Planet Labs, planetary scale, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog

Put another way, our society changed more in the last 50 years than at any other time in history. More startling, we changed more in the last 50 years than in the entirety of human existence.13 [Original author’s emphases.] There are commercially successful super optimists on the theme of where all of this is taking us. People like Steven Pinker and the late Hans Rosling have argued that we are living in the most peaceful times ever, statistically speaking. In the last hundred years, we have seen the average human life expectancy nearly doubled—indeed, as I wrote these words, my father was ninety-eight, my mother ninety-six. Such things do not go on forever, however.14 And the threat of the Anthropocene epoch is that our species, so successful in improving its own life expectancy and living conditions over a generation or two, may so disrupt the wider world that the very foundations of nature and civilization crack.


pages: 393 words: 91,257

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, company town, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, deplatforming, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guest worker program, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job polarisation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, life extension, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Occupy movement, Parag Khanna, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Satyajit Das, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, technological determinism, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population, Y Combinator

Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1957), vol. 1: 914–15; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The Essential Left (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1961), 15–17. 18 E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution (New York: New American Library, 1962), 222. 19 Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson, “Unequal gains: American growth and inequality since 1700,” Vox, CEPR Policy Portal, June 16, 2016, https://voxeu.org/article/american-growth-and-inequality-1700. 20 Hans Rosling, “Good news at last: the world isn’t as horrific as you think,” Guardian, April 11, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2018/apr/11/good-news-at-last-the-world-isnt-as-horrific-as-you-think; Homi Kharas and Kristofer Hamel, “A global tipping point: Half the world is now middle class or wealthier,” September 27, 2018, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2018/09/27/a-global-tipping-point-half-the-world-is-now-middle-class-or-wealthier/?


pages: 332 words: 106,197

The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions by Jason Hickel

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Attenborough, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, degrowth, dematerialisation, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, European colonialism, falling living standards, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Howard Zinn, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, James Watt: steam engine, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land value tax, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, Mahatma Gandhi, Money creation, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration

That same year, Charles Kenny published Getting Better: Why Global Development is Succeeding, with a glowing foreword by Bill Gates. Gates himself published a public letter in 2014, opening with the words: ‘By almost any measure, the world is better than it has ever been.’ And the Swedish academic Hans Rosling continued to make his earnest presentations with shiny visual gimmicks illustrating how the plight of the poor keeps improving. Rosling’s TED Talk, ‘The Best Stats You’ve Ever Seen’, has been viewed more than 10 million times. The UN’s poverty-reduction figures quickly became some of the most repeated statistics in the world.


pages: 375 words: 105,586

A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth by Chris Smaje

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, climate change refugee, collaborative consumption, Corn Laws, COVID-19, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, energy transition, European colonialism, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, fake news, financial deregulation, financial independence, Food sovereignty, Ford Model T, future of work, Gail Bradbrook, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, hive mind, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jevons paradox, land reform, mass immigration, megacity, middle-income trap, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, post-industrial society, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, Rutger Bregman, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

Benanav 2019; Sayer 2016, 5; Streeck 2016. 125. Klein 2001, 87; Streeck 2016. 126. For example, Ploeg 2008. 127. Pinker 2018, 364. 128. WDI n.d. 129. Suwandi 2019. 130. A plot of GDP per capita for each country without aggregation suggests an inflection point around the top fifty countries or so. My comments here directly contradict Hans Rosling’s assertion that there is no longer a gap between the rich, old Western world and the larger part of the rest: Rosling 2018, 28. 131. WDI n.d. 132. Parenti 2011, 241–2. 133. Vinten-Johanson et al. 2003, 256. 134. WDI n.d. 135. Hickel 2017; Milanovic 2016. 136. UN DESA (2017) ‘Development Issues #10: International Financial Flows and External Debt,’ 24 March, https://www.un.org/development/desa/dpad/publication/development-issues-no-10-international-financial-flows-and-external-debt/. 137. 


pages: 422 words: 113,525

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, back-to-the-land, biofilm, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, business process, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dark matter, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, digital divide, Easter island, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, land tenure, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, megaproject, microbiome, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, out of africa, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, rewilding, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, We are as Gods, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, William Langewiesche, working-age population, Y2K

The “rise of the West” is over. The world looks the way it did a thousand years ago, when the ten largest cities were Córdoba, in Spain; Kaifeng, in China; Constantinople; Angkor, in Cambodia; Kyoto; Cairo; Baghdad; Nishapur, in Iran; Al-Hasa, in Saudi Arabia; and Patan, in India. As Swedish statistician Hans Rosling says, “The world will be normal again; it will be an Asian world, as it always was except for these last thousand years. They are working like hell to make that happen, whereas we are consuming like hell.” • It may be distracting, though, to focus just on the world’s twenty-four megacities—those with a population over 10 million.


pages: 494 words: 116,739

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology by Kentaro Toyama

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blood diamond, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gamification, germ theory of disease, global village, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Khan Academy, Kibera, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, North Sea oil, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, Twitter Arab Spring, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, Y2K

Additionally, my writing benefited from conversations and other forms of support from many, many people: Debbie Apsley, Özlem Ayduk, Marika Arcese, Siva Athreya, Garima Bhatia, Chris Blattman, Peter Blomquist, Maurizio Bricola, Jenna Burrell, Suvojit Chattopadhyay, Deepti Chittamuru, Magdalena Claro, Josh Cohen, Kristina Cordero, David Daballen, Kristen Dailey, John Danner, Ankhi Das, Alain de Janvry, Thad Dunning, Paolo Ficarelli, Greg Fischer, Bablu Ganguly, Maria Gargiulo, Achintya Ghosh, Rachel Glennerster, Richa Govil, Jürgen Hagmann, Naomi Handa-Williams, Saskia Harmsen, Gaël Hernández, Melissa Ho, Shanti Jayanthasri, Rob Jensen, Ashok Jhunjhunwala, Joseph Joy, Pritam Kabe, Ken Keniston, Neelima Khetan, Jessica Kiessel, Michael Kremer, Ramchandar Krishnamurthy, Antony Lekoitip, Miep Lenoir, Julia Lowe, Jeff MacKie-Mason, Drew McDermott, Patricia Mecheal, Pavithra Mehta, Ted Miguel, Eduardo Monge, Rohan Murty, Miguel Nussbaum, Chip Owen, Tapan Parikh, Paul Polak, Madhavi Raj, Ranjeet Ranade, Gautam Rao, Eric Ringger, Hans Rosling, Elisabeth Sadoulet, Maximiliano Santa Cruz Scantlebury, Jonathan Scanlon, Denise Senmartin, Jahanzeb Sherwani, Priyanka Singh, Pratima Stanton, Rick Szeliski, Steve Toben, Mike Trucano, Avinash Upadhyay, Dipti Vaghela, Suzanne van der Velden, Srikant Vasan, Wayan Vota, Terry Winograd, Christian Witt, Renee Wittemeyer, and Naa Lamle Wulff.


pages: 677 words: 121,255

Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist by Michael Shermer

Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-communist, anti-fragile, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Chelsea Manning, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, creative destruction, dark matter, deplatforming, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, gun show loophole, Hans Rosling, heat death of the universe, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, income inequality, intentional community, invisible hand, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kim Stanley Robinson, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, luminiferous ether, Mars Society, McMansion, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, moral panic, More Guns, Less Crime, Multics, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, positional goods, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra

Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered what, in the fullness of time, would become his most memorable vision from his 1963 magisterial “I Have a Dream” speech, he could not have known how much progress in civil rights would ensue over the coming half-century, in no small measure because of his work. Human progress in general, and moral advancement in particular, have been documented in detail in a number of recent books, including Hans Rosling’s Factfulness (2018, Flatiron Books), Yuval Noah Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018, Spiegel & Grau), Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now (2018, Penguin) and The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011, Penguin), Greg Easterbrook’s It’s Better Than it Looks (2018, PublicAffairs), Johan Norberg’s Progress (2017, OneWorld), my own The Moral Arc (2015, Henry Holt), and Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist (2010, HarperCollins).


pages: 578 words: 131,346

Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Airbnb, Anton Chekhov, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Broken windows theory, call centre, data science, David Graeber, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, Easter island, experimental subject, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Garrett Hardin, Hans Rosling, invention of writing, invisible hand, knowledge economy, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, nocebo, placebo effect, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, World Values Survey

Snow, ‘Science and Government’, The Godkin Lectures (1960). 2David Hume, ‘Of the Independency of Parliament’, in Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (1758, Part 1). 3See the famous poem by Bernard Mandeville ‘The Grumbling Hive: Or, Knaves turn’d Honest’, The Fable of The Bees: or, Private Vices, Public Benefits (1714). 4Marshall Sahlins, The Western Illusion of Human Nature (Chicago, 2008), pp. 72–6. 5His Holiness Pope Francis, ‘Why the Only Future Worth Building Includes Everyone’, TED Talks (April 2017). 6Ara Norenzayan, Big Gods (Princeton, 2013), p. 75. 7If you don’t believe it, this will set you straight: Hans Rosling, Factfulness. Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think (New York, 2018). 8For an overview, see the first chapter of my previous book Utopia for Realists (London, 2017). 9See, for example, Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, 1989), and Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism.


pages: 462 words: 150,129

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, food miles, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Large Hadron Collider, Mark Zuckerberg, Medieval Warm Period, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, packet switching, patent troll, Pax Mongolica, Peter Thiel, phenotype, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, spice trade, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, working poor, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Changes in the Process of Aging during the Twentieth Century: Findings and Procedures of the Early Indicators Project. NBER Working Papers 9941, National Bureau of Economic Research. p. 19 ‘Yet the global effect of the growth of China and India has been to reduce the difference between rich and poor worldwide.’ This is especially clear in Hans Rosling’s animated graphs of global income distribution at www.gapminder.com. Incidentally, the individualisation of life that brought personal freedom after the 1960s also brought less loyalty towards the group, a process that surely reached crisis point in the bonus rows of 2009: see Lindsey, B. 2009.


pages: 807 words: 154,435

Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future by Mervyn King, John Kay

Airbus A320, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, algorithmic trading, anti-fragile, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 737 MAX, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, capital asset pricing model, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, DeepMind, demographic transition, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, easy for humans, difficult for computers, eat what you kill, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial deregulation, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, Goodhart's law, Hans Rosling, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, nudge theory, oil shock, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, popular electronics, power law, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, sealed-bid auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Suez crisis 1956, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, value at risk, world market for maybe five computers, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

A survey in 2016 across twenty-six countries showed that 84% of respondents believed that extreme poverty in the world had risen or remained the same. 10 But extreme poverty has fallen by more than half in the last two decades, benefiting more than a billion people. 11 This may be the single most important fact about the global economy over the period. In his bestselling Factfulness , Hans Rosling has reported that such ignorance was even widespread in India and China, whose rapid economic growth has been responsible for much of the improvement. 12 College students did a little better than the population as a whole. But we are concerned that modern economics teaching puts emphasis on quantitative methods without giving students the opportunity to learn much either about data sources or about the principles by which data are compiled.


pages: 1,239 words: 163,625

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated by Gautam Baid

Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, backtesting, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, business process, buy and hold, Cal Newport, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, do what you love, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fear index, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, follow your passion, framing effect, George Santayana, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Singleton, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, index fund, intangible asset, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Masayoshi Son, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive income, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, six sigma, software as a service, software is eating the world, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, subscription business, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, tail risk, Teledyne, the market place, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Richard Feynman taught me the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something. Seneca, Aurelius, Epictetus, and Ryan Holiday enlightened me on the virtues of stoicism and of being in control of our personal reaction to any event in our lives. Will Durant, Ariel Durant, and Yuval Noah Harari educated me on the history of human civilization. Steven Pinker and Hans Rosling instilled great optimism in me about the constant, ongoing improvements in our world on a daily basis. My life truly epitomizes Isaac Newton’s saying: “If I have seen further, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.” The Joys of Compounding is my heartfelt tribute to all of my teachers who helped me achieve financial independence, become a better and wiser person, and embark on the path to a fulfilling and meaningful life.


pages: 586 words: 186,548

Architects of Intelligence by Martin Ford

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, cognitive bias, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Flash crash, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, information retrieval, job automation, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, means of production, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, phenotype, Productivity paradox, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, sensor fusion, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, synthetic biology, systems thinking, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working-age population, workplace surveillance , zero-sum game, Zipcar

We need to make very serious contemplations, which does not mean that we’re not going to have moral ethics; it does. It just means that it needs to be balanced to realize that we are in a tough spot. For example, there’s a couple of books that have come out, like Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World, and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, by Hans Rosling, and Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Those books basically say that the world’s not bad, and that although everyone says how terrible it is, all the data says it’s getting better, and it’s getting better faster. What they’re not contemplating is that the future is dramatically different to the past.


pages: 733 words: 179,391

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought by Andrew W. Lo

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, Arthur Eddington, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bob Litterman, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, break the buck, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, confounding variable, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, Diane Coyle, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, double helix, easy for humans, difficult for computers, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, framing effect, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, housing crisis, incomplete markets, index fund, information security, interest rate derivative, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Jim Simons, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, language acquisition, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, martingale, megaproject, merger arbitrage, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, Nick Leeson, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, p-value, PalmPilot, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, predatory finance, prediction markets, price discovery process, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, Shai Danziger, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical arbitrage, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, systematic bias, Thales and the olive presses, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, Walter Mischel, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

These activities necessarily increase the required scale of financial markets, as well as the complexity of the interactions among the various counterparties. We’ve reshaped the world into a far different place. A compelling illustration of this difference can be seen in the pair of graphs in figure 8.3 (in the color section) using the Swedish demographer Hans Rosling’s excellent Gapminder data visualization tools. These two graphs display measures of health and wealth—the average life expectancy and per capita gross domestic product (GDP)—for various countries around the world in 1900 and 2013. Each country is a circle and the size is proportional to its population.


pages: 593 words: 183,240

An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford Delong

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, ASML, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, ending welfare as we know it, endogenous growth, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial repression, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, German hyperinflation, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, industrial research laboratory, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, It's morning again in America, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, occupational segregation, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Pearl River Delta, Phillips curve, plutocrats, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, Stanislav Petrov, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Suez canal 1869, surveillance capitalism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, TSMC, union organizing, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, Yom Kippur War

Also seeing a “long” twentieth century as most useful is the keen-sighted and learned Ivan Berend in An Economic History of Twentieth-Century Europe: Economic Regimes from Laissez-Faire to Globalization, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 4. Friedrich A. von Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review 35, no. 4 (September 1945): 519–530. 5. Hans Rosling et al., Gapminder, http://gapminder.org; “Globalization over Five Centuries, World,” Our World in Data, https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/globalization-over-5-centuries?country=~OWID_WRL. 6. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, London: Communist League, 1848; Jonathan Sperber, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life, New York: Liveright, 2013; Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, New York: Verso, 1983. 7.