Hans Rosling on ‘Five ways the world is doing better than you think’

Don't you just love the BBC website? Just as I am preparing my lessons on global Poverty and Inequality for my A2 Macro students, here is an article written by Hans Rosling about the enormous progress most countries have made in recent decades. He uses statistics to suggest that tremendous global progress has been made towards improving quality of lives in five key ways.

There is a quiz - How Much Do You Know About The World, or 'The Ignorance Test', which will make a great lesson starter.

And as a follow-up, BBC2 has an hour-long programme tonight at 21.00 (22.30 in Scotland) called Don't Panic - the truth about Population (which will be available on i-player) - the programme synopsis says

"Using state of the art 3D graphics and the timing of a stand-up comedian, world famous statistician Professor Hans Rosling presents a spectacular portrait of our rapidly changing world. With 7 billion people already on our planet we often look to the future with dread, but Rosling's message is surprisingly upbeat. Almost unnoticed we have actually begun to conquer the problems of rapid population growth and extreme poverty."

No doubt there will be plenty of counter arguments to the points that Rosling makes. For example, one of his five measures of improvement is about health; over the last 50 years, average global life expectancy has increased from 60 to 70. But that average masks some severe exceptions. In the 1870's, at the time of the Anglo-Zulu wars and the battle of Rorke's Drift in South Africa, the average life span of a Zulu was 70 years; today it is around 35, with AIDS playing a major role in that decline.

But these resources should set up this and many other discussions perfectly - brilliant!