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Title: Why it's important to continue aiming for a fact-based worldview | Klara Johansson | TEDxUmeå
Published: 2017-07-11
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_59FSCf_BB8
if we would take a random person anywhere on this planet the chances today if we do that today the chances are actually really good and better than ever that this random person who just happened to be someone who has enough food to eat that has an education and who will never in their life have to go to a child's funeral but you guys already know I
was going to start with something like that right because you know this talk is in honor of professor Hans Rosling who repeated the similar method him countless Ted talks Hans like to emphasize that their global life expectancy is increasing in the world than this now at the Mavericks all of the seventy thank you so it's a sad then beat their irony of life that haunts himself
passed away in February aged only sixty eight I'm not going to talk so much about homes I think he'd be annoyed with me if I spend too much in my time with you talking about him instead of getting to the to the point you see he was very enthusiastic when he lectured but he was even more enthusiastic when someone else lectured when someone stole his lecture
ideas and did their own motion that made him so happy and why well because he really wanted people to have who were a worldview that is based on fact and not based on misconceptions and the fact that he lectured about are such that everybody should have these facts but instead people tend to have misconceptions that are way off the map in the other direction and the
best way to solve that is probably a if as many as possible Alaskan just do our own version of explaining these facts then we could reach even more people and also when you explain something to someone you actually understand it better yourself so that that's what I'm doing today I am here today to go through would use some of the basic facts and trends of human
existence at and there that would help me understand them better so thank you guys for being here today to help me with this I'm sorry to take advantage of you in this very selfish way this is a picture of all the humans in the world can you see us that we are each standing on their individual income with glowing come down here and high income appear
all of the countries of today's world are in there this data is approximate and meaning it's not exact but it is reliable and it gives a good overall picture this is the third line down here this is the U. N. defined line of extreme poverty in twenty fifteen about eleven percent of the world's population live down here in some ways this line is a bit arbitrary
because it's not going to be huge difference for person if they live just above here just below it here but then some other ways this is the most brutally absolute line in the world because if you live somewhere here in this corner your life is going to be they to struggle just to have food for yourself and for your family feeling a little bit the barbecue
would still be pretty poor but you have a little bit of extra resources that you can use to make your life better or to make an income more stable or higher okay let's see what has happened during my lifetime I was born in nineteen seventy six and at that time half the world's population lived in extreme poverty this is adjusted for purchasing powers it is compatible
over time and this is happened during my lifetime some people have got them they reached a lot of people stay here in extreme poverty but most people have moved over here to a relatively safe distance from the poverty line where they tend to have to chide families a good education and freaky okay living standards let me show you this development in another way we go back
to nineteen seventy six again this is a map of women's education in the world yeah in those dark red countries that women have basically no education at the book but let's move forward ninety seven six eight to six ninety six two thousand six and two thousand and fifteen that nowadays women have on average seven years of education on the world and then those deep red countries
they have on the average one year which is not so great but it's better than if Wilson if you look at the young women it's even better they have on average nine and a half years of education and then those red countries it's but the average is around two years the man remains throughout this period at about one year ahead of the women this is the
young men yeah in some countries with long education the young women have passed the young man but that's another story so what about the kids all children who should go out of the age that they should be in primary school ninety one percent are in primary school and you see the difference between boys and girls have almost disappeared when it comes to at primary school but
look at this new the gap and nine percent of children that is sixty million children are not in school even though they should be and it's a challenge to reach these what children because they often live in areas that the very poor that are hit by war I'm going to go through this development in yet another way third way here are the Bob as you know
the bubbles right and this is another map of the countries of the world each about but it's a country the size of the bubble is the population we still have money on this axis but now it's average money by country and on this axis we now have survival measure this life expectancy life expectancy is a measure of how average how old we are on average when
we die let's go back this time let's go back to eighteen hundred this is the same map but in eighteen hundred all of the countries of today's where they're in there and that this adjusted the purchasing power so it is compatible over time in that time and every time before that we estimate that life expectancy was about forty but that's an average that doesn't mean that
people live than than they were for it and then they drop dead not me as a child mortality was very high there of ten kids born but four to five died before age five and then some guy teenager young adults in childbirth we tend not to think about that when we read Jane Austen the rich people also died quite a lot because they didn't know how
diseases spread they didn't have antibiotics a host but those were not so great okay let's see what happens now is that the government did to start time my read the who okay start time see here time starts rolling out so much happens in the beginning some of these bubbles move up and down the lot those are the bulbous where we have good data from a palette
is we know we care so good years and bad years with high mortality epidemics famines you see United Kingdom and then another labs are leading the team there in terms of money but they still have pretty bad hence life expectancy is still very short and then France and Germany you United States starts following that what life has been very short but then in the second half
of the center left the medical lab winnings were down there it is going to be a guy called John snow is not from game of thrones he discovered that color was spread through Walker and then another gate guide nine post done he figured out the look of stuff about how diseases spread the man Florence Nightingale the John list there they really pushed for nurses and doctors
to wash and disinfect their heads and tools in hospitals which improves survival in hospitals and then add the smallpox vaccine which was discovered a hundred years earlier was implemented in some of these countries where there were lots of this government to get discovers but they really found it difficult implemented in many countries people find it very controversial that you got sick by drinking someone else's poop
but then you we moved up here after the first World War and then at the end of the war beyond the Spanish flu it's a hard but the sat there killed more people people in the public policy Japan is also starting to improve permissiveness invented there and there's a popping in east Europe and then we start his thoughts improve really with the compulsive even alright but
then we have the horrible second World War I'm gonna take a break here at the end of the war look this this really hit this really hit parts of your very hard and this part of the word distilled down here with short lives and the very poor so what happens after the war but during the war penicillin start mass production after the war a lot of
these countries get their independence and also there is international collaboration really goes big after the war with that and United Nations and the World Health Organization so let's look at what happens after the war immediately this come to start improving health is like a cloud lifting all these countries going up to work longer lives trying to have a Harbans happened there due to bad central planning
but then they recover smallpox vaccine is implemented in more countries Nigeria that was aboard the fab monogamous he come bow to coming down here with this this genocide but that's what book is that they read the gig there and then in nineteen they does China start getting richer and having more money and then we would see the full of the Soviet Union yellow kinda coming back
there and then in the nineteen nineties these blue Bob African goddess of the aids epidemic in the come down that is very hard but but then they would start coming around again now that we have the recent economic crisis to barely a blip there and then we come up on today's world in many ways this is a very unequal word that difference between the richest countries
in the poorest countries is huge but most countries are here in the middle so this is why it no longer makes sense to divide countries into two groups and talk about developing countries in developed countries those concepts are outdated that they are not not useful any longer and also look at these countries don't hear they have an economist similar to the in the eighteen hundreds but
their life expectancy is much higher no than any country was back then beget more heads for the money these days a lot of people when they are asked they say the poverty is increasing and the world is getting worse why is it so difficult to get into our heads that this this development has happened well partly because these are slow and long term trends and they
clash with what they see on the news partly I think because when we see so much mystery still in the world that seems sort of disrespectful to sit in our safe corner of the world then go like woo hoo everything is getting better anyway but in other ways it's also disrespectful to be ignorant of this amazing improvement that that's happened in many of these countries and
to have this tech based world view we would need to be curious we need to have an open mind we need to be ready to accept the fact that go against our current worldview I'm going to be a little bit provocative and now I'm going to say that pro gnosis is behind this development as far as I understand and I have elements that are popular with
in some different political world views there are strong elements of economic growth investments trade there are also strong elements of a M. tax funded health care foreign aid redistribution of wealth a government regulation and incentives so if you have ever read well defined political worldview you might be ready to accept at best only half of this big I'm just going to leave that there would you
anyway for me as a public health researcher I'm most interested in the public health efforts that have been made to improve your butt heads so I'm gonna mention some of them one very important effects scenes I just was more books was a dedicated polio is about to be eradicated last year there were stuck to seven cases of polio in the world and this year we might
see the last cases of polio ever or maybe next year the basic F. package of childhood vaccines has now reached eighty six percent of the world's children I'm gonna have me says it vaccination ethnic company I see that as measles vaccinations go up the deaths from measles among children goes down measles vaccination has saved millions of children in the world then there's this exciting thing about
possible new vaccines only last week the World Health Organization announced that they would be pilot testing if it's seen from malaria if this works this could be a game changer then there are other forms of prevention you can hand out the even that's it's important to make sure people have toilets and clean water work for traffic safety hand out condoms %HESITATION it's also very important to
reach people with health care especially for pregnancy and delivery of children this photo from Ron that which is one of the poorest countries in the world yeah but they have a pretty good survival of newborn babies because they have a general universe and has kept them and then of course family planning when women can decide to have fewer babies if they want then both the women
and the babies tend to have better health and better life prospects speaking of this when some people see this thing and development then they can some people have this reaction that okay but it all if all these people would survive done we would have uncontrollable population growth no it's the opposite when people when families see that baby survive they tend to have fewer babies so this
has happened in all the world the number of babies per woman is going down and the global average is now two point five babies per woman so population growth is already stopping but it will take sometime to grind to a halt and this is going to be the most complicated part of this lecture the thing is that the number of children have start stop growing but
the older generations are still smaller so as they pass along as they very sadly do and population growth will keep going for a little light even though the number of children is no longer increasing then we will get a little bit older yeah and then we will end up at eleven billion then this is already in motion and very lethal is going to change this except
that large scale zombie apocalypse people used to call a halt an optimist and he always answered no no I'm not an optimist I'm a possibility but that makes sense right if you have a realistic awareness of how much stuff has gotten better you can also see the possibilities and it also makes it easier to see the problems that still remain as like the mist clears and
you're like okay what this thing is on track but this thing is really a problem then let's do something about this and of course there are still some big challenges first of all of course there's a dark underside to this beautiful development that we've seen while all this amazing things have happened we have really been living above all resources would the Aris are polluted air there's
plastic in the ocean where cutting down forests were messing with the climate to this species are going extinct we have so much knowledge in the world now so we need to apply this knowledge and make sure that eleven billion people can live on this planet sustainably and with the living found that with good living conditions yeah another resource we've been misusing its it or over use