Jahan and Rosling Response

DJ Olson 2/04/20

Just because a country is doing well, does not mean its citizens are prospering. Selim Jahan elaborated upon this idea in his talk which highlighted the importance on looking at real world situations from the prospective of the individual. Just because a country’s government is thriving and large corporations are prosperous does not mean that the quality of life for the common citizen within the country is good. Instead Jahan stated that if we want to focus on human development, we need to focus on the person, rather than measures of the countries wealth like GDP. To measure this we use Human Development Index or HDI. HDI takes into account many measures that more accurately represent the quality of a person’s life withing a country such as: health measured by life expectancy at birth, education measured by expected years schooling for school-age children and average years of schooling in the adult population, and income measured by Gross National Income (GNI) per capita. Thus, if a country focuses more on the individual instead of the overall economy, quality of life with increase, and the economy will naturally follow suit.

Hans Rosling, a Swedish academic, expanded upon this idea of countries shifting the focus from money to how people live when pursuing human develpment in his Ted Talk. Rosling starts his discussion by indicating that many of us have preconceived notions about the socioeconomic status of the different parts of the world. He used a survey he conducted in which many Asian and Eastern European countries were identified as less wealthy than their matched pair to demonstrate just how little most people know about the development and wealth distribution in different countries. People simply assumed that countries located in Asia and Eastern Europe were poorer because they have always thought of the western world as superior. It’s not that people in the survey simply didn’t know the answer and got unlucky when guessing which country was richer, people were actually confident in their wrong answers, showing just how dangerous and impactful our preconceived notions can be. After proving that people have a need to be educated, he continued by showing a variety of data sets starting in the 1960s that tracked wealth vs life expectancy and child survival rates for countries around the world. In doing so, he was able to show that the most important focus a developing country can pursue is public health. The standard many countries have used and still use to this day to show development and standard of living is GDP. What Rosling was able to do in his study was show a global correlation between GDP and life expectancy, displaying that regardless of region, country, or climate, pursuing public health and increasing your citizens life expectancy is the most beneficial thing a country can do. To do this requires that leadership within countries place a high priority on health education and making available different forms of public health reform. For example, he showed that even though the GDP in the United Arab Emirates has started to decline due to a drop in oil rates, because leaders placed a high value on public health while the country was still profitable, the average life expectancy increased, proving that health reform starts with countries leaders placing value upon reform.

Furthermore, Rosling also tried to breakdown the stigma of “us and them,” in which the western world sees itself as developed and well off, and everything else falls into the category of third world, struggling countires. Rosling saw this as a potential danger because statistics over the years have created this outlook, but when you actually breakdown the populations of countries by regions, poverty and wealth exists in almost every country. Thus, averaging populations and describing an entire region of the world as poor is never accurate. Some regions may be poorer on average than others, but we need to recognize that within each of these regions can exist many wealthy and poor countries. We can’t simply decide that an entire region of the world is poor, because when we do this, we create the preconceived notions that inffluenced so many people to make the wrong decision in Rosling’s survey. Furthermore, as the world develops, the overlap between weathly and poor countries continues to grow, and thus, the segregation of poverty continues to decrease. Now poverty exists within almost every country in the world in certain subsets of the population. Describing a region as impoverished is simply too broad of a claim to make in today’s world, especially when we have the data and technology to make more specific and accurate claims. In closing, we need to understand that the world is no longer black and white, and we must analyze each situation individually. We can’t just section off the world into chunks, because while this is visually appealing and easy to understand, it often leads to conclusions being made about entire populations that aren’t entirley true, and we are left with ideas about parts of the world that are false.