Pharyngula

Posted by: Matt "Nora" Penfold | November 30, 2010 12:19 PM

I'm also kind of blown away by the fact that the BBC has a documentary about statistics. How do they get an audience without blowing things up or the occasional sleazy sexual affair?

By not assuming that their audience has a shorter attention span than a gnat.

This did go out on BBC Four, which is the intelligent channel of the BBC's TV output. It has had some brilliant documentaries this year.

Posted by: Ben Goren | November 30, 2010 12:24 PM

That was 100% pure awesome.

Cheers,

b&

Posted by: llewelly | November 30, 2010 12:28 PM

This animated graph has been noised about the before, just not this documentary.

Posted by: Brownian, Most Vicious & Petty of Pharyngulites | November 30, 2010 12:36 PM

Hans Rosling has become a sort of statistician celeb: his TED talks are always big hits. I didn't notice if they plugged on the video, but the software he uses and developed is called Gapminder, and is available (with the data) for free.

Posted by: James Hrynyshyn | November 30, 2010 12:42 PM

Magical. That made my day. Thanks for sharing.

Posted by: yanshen71786 | November 30, 2010 12:42 PM

Great video PZ. I seem to recall watching a video before by Hans Rosling on the rise of Asia.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiK5-oAaeUs

By the way, I've been harping on this point here for quite a while now. The Industrial Revolution was one of the most important events in human history in terms of advancing human economic well-being! And many of the advances could rightfully be attributed to a handful of individuals. Hurrah for the cognitive elite.

His points regarding China in that video are remarkably insightful. Most people aren't fully aware of just how much variance there is in the distribution of incomes in the country. The well developed places today, like Beijing, Shanghai, or Shenzhen, are close to first world standards, once you adjust the data for purchasing power parity. I'm not sure how he concluded that Shanghai was equivalent to Italy economically, because the PPP adjusted per capita income in Italy is roughly $29,000, whereas the same number for Shanghai is slightly over $20,000. But the point still remains, the most developed places in China today are fairly close to first world standards(perhaps they're part of the 1.5th world?)

If anything, I would say that the rise of East Asia has been one of the most remarkable occurrences in recent human history, with places like Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong more or less having attained first world status and China surely to join them in the upcoming decades.(Japan of course modernized long before any of the so called East Asian Tigers.) Most people don't realize that in the early 1960s, many places in East Asia, like Singapore and South Korea had per capita incomes amongst the lowest in the world and more or less on par with many of the African nations. The fact that these countries have reached first world standards in only a little over four decades is truly remarkable.

I also liked his comment at the end about the convergence between the developing world and the developed world. While I'm not nearly as sanguine as he is about economic development in all parts of the world, it's obvious that over time the gap between many developed and developing nations will inevitably close. What this means is that many of us will have to learn to deal with a far more multi-polar world order, once the dominance of the West eventually declines.(In fact one might argue that given the recent economic malaise in American and European economies, this decline has already begun, in light of East Asia's relative economic stability.)

By the way, Martin Jacques has an extremely insightful book called "When China Rules the World:The End of the Western World and the Emergence of a New Global Order", in which he argues that the Chinese have an extremely lengthy historical mindset which regards the resurgence of China not as the creation of a new world order, but merely as the resumption of the status quo which existed before the rise of modern Europe in the 1500s to 1600s and the relative decline of the Chinese country around that time.

Posted by: Mapariensis | November 30, 2010 12:44 PM

Hans Rosling is cool. I really loved his videos on TED.com.

Posted by: э̀иэЯ | November 30, 2010 1:08 PM

Pretty neat, 'ey? 1948 was a great year. (Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, you know what I mean?)

Posted by: Erik | November 30, 2010 1:13 PM

2 years ago I never would have thought I would use this term, but Hans Rosling is easily my favorite statistician.

Posted by: Normalised | November 30, 2010 1:20 PM

talking of data visualisation, has this been mentioned here before?

http://www.project-reason.org/gallery3/image/105/

Posted by: Dude... Real Men Watch Ponies! | November 30, 2010 1:36 PM

I love NationMaster site. You can play around with correlation between different data-set and look at how those correlation evolve over-time.

Next goal, build a real-life screen that can do what the video do (float in mid-air while maintaining high fidelity).

Posted by: yanshen71786 | November 30, 2010 1:40 PM

Thanks Mao, asshole.

Didn't that asshole also rail against the bourgeois intellectual elite and become obsessed with centrally planned economies? ;)

By the way, my parents actually lived through the cultural revolution. They were both sent to the countryside to work as peasants on communal farms during part of the cultural revolution. Gotta commend Mao for forcing the intellectual/cognitive elites to work on communal farms along with everyone else. I mean, he tried to make sure that no one became too uppity and contributed more value to society than anyone else. ;)

In 1958, after China’s first Five-Year Plan, Mao called for "grassroots socialism" in order to accelerate his plans for turning China into a modern industrial state. In this spirit, Mao launched the Great Leap Forward, established People's Communes in the countryside, and began the mass mobilization of the people. Many communities were assigned production of a single commodity - steel. Mao vowed to increase agricultural production to twice 1957 levels and to quickly transform China into an industrialized nation.[2]

The Great Leap was an economic failure. Industries went into turmoil because peasants were producing too much low-quality steel while other areas were neglected. Furthermore, uneducated low-income farmers were poorly equipped and ill-trained to produce steel, partially relying on backyard furnaces to achieve the production targets set by local cadres. Meanwhile, essential farm tools were melted down for steel, reducing harvest sizes. This led to a decline in the production of most goods except substandard pig iron and steel. To make matters worse, in order to avoid punishment, local authorities frequently exaggerated production numbers, thus hiding and intensifying the problem for several years.[3]

Having not fully recovered from decades of war, the Chinese economy was again in shambles. In 1958, the party had no choice but to admit that production numbers were exaggerated. In addition, much of the steel produced was impure and useless. In the meantime, chaos in the collectives, bad weather, and exports of food necessary to secure hard currencies resulted in the Great Chinese Famine. Food was in desperate shortage, and production fell dramatically. According to various sources, the death toll during this period was some 20 to 30 million.[4]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution#Great_Leap_Forward

Posted by: Cor (formerly evil) | November 30, 2010 1:47 PM

By the way, my parents actually lived through the cultural revolution. They were both sent to the countryside to work as peasants on communal farms during part of the cultural revolution. Gotta commend Mao for forcing the intellectual/cognitive elites to work on communal farms along with everyone else. I mean, he tried to make sure that no one became too uppity and contributed more value to society than anyone else. ;)

Ok, so he wasn't all bad.

Posted by: Cat's Staff | November 30, 2010 1:51 PM

He could have done his sword swallowing trick. All of his TED talks are worth watching.

Posted by: Brownian, Most Vicious & Petty of Pharyngulites | November 30, 2010 1:54 PM

I mean, he tried to make sure that no one became too uppity and contributed more value to society than anyone else. ;)

Once yanshen's "Rah! Rah! Asians + Capitalists Rah!" spam clogs up yet another thread, it will have served the same purpose.

Posted by: Brownian, Most Vicious & Petty of Pharyngulites | November 30, 2010 2:01 PM

So many people went through hell, and you are only concerned about the cognitive elites?

Yanshen, meet ibyea. Ibyea, meet our latest one-trick pony.

If it doesn't serve to further yanshen's ideology—that is, the two best things in the world are libertarianism and Asians—it doesn't exist. (Don't get me wrong; his silence on all matters otherwise occidental is most welcome.)

And yet he lauds cognitive elites—people whose ability to to ruminate on multiple topics far surpasses that of most others...it's baffling.

Posted by: ibyea | November 30, 2010 2:04 PM

@Browmian
I am Asian, but even I am somewhat weirded out by his Asian fetish.

Posted by: ibyea | November 30, 2010 2:11 PM

@UberFubarius
Jesus. I was wondering what kind of event was so horrible that the country went backwards a thousand miles, and that explains so much.

Posted by: BEG | November 30, 2010 2:17 PM

Seen without the audio -- still interesting though I might have missed things.

I'd be extremely curious to add in fossil fuel consumption to that graph. Because I think that's what has propelled a good deal of this wealth, and that may make this whole thing a giant 200-300 year economic bubble unless we manage to move off the abundant energy available from fossil fuels.

Posted by: Carl Zimmer | November 30, 2010 2:23 PM

The perfect example to show scientists who worry that making science accessible is the equivalent of dumbing down.

Posted by: Brownian, Most Vicious & Petty of Pharyngulites | November 30, 2010 2:39 PM

The perfect example to show scientists who worry that making science accessible is the equivalent of dumbing down.

I'm amazed that argument is still being made. We're over a decade past the death of the great populariser, Sagan; informed, lucid, and skilled popular science writers like Brian Greene, *ahem* Carl Zimmer, and Richard Dawkins abound; and comics like XKCD and PHDcomics are being quoted by non-nerds.

Why aren't these stodgy lock-up-the-ivory-tower-before-you-leave scientists, straight out of a 1950s pulp sci fi magazine story, retiring to paint seascapes between naps by now?

Posted by: Brownian, Most Vicious & Petty of Pharyngulites | November 30, 2010 2:48 PM

Love it, and actual documentary! Didn't we channels that used to air those in the US a while back?

Documentaries got phased out in favour of Reality TV, where 'Reality' in this case refers not to reality-as-scientists-understand-it, but instead to a semi-mythological beastie called a 'Snookie'.

Posted by: https://me.yahoo.com/a/ho2ALK813NMXZ.MP0Dtm4FspZ8Y3mGYM.fJm#2575e | November 30, 2010 2:52 PM

@37 Thanks for the recomendation. Yes, we can usually get the podcasts of BBC radio 4 shows and this one is free, like the others. I really miss British TV at times, though, nice to see there are still some good programes being broadcast. Would be nice if BBC America actually showed something like this rather than repeats of Dr Who, Top Gear and Gordon Ramsey!

Posted by: BilBy | November 30, 2010 3:06 PM

@Ibyea #25 - could have been Zimbabwe? Run by the 'crazy old man' (thanks wikileaks) Uncle Bob Mugabe.

Posted by: BilBy | November 30, 2010 3:11 PM

Oops - it was Rwanda

Posted by: shhandy | November 30, 2010 4:01 PM

Beeb 2 is still very watchable - about to tuck into 'The food that made billions'. Investigative series on how the food industry markets thing you never thought you needed e.g. Bottled Water!

Posted by: MadScientist | November 30, 2010 4:03 PM

@yanshen#49: That's funny, because the link you provided does affirm my suspicions that there is a sizeable population within the US which is about on par with the national average income of some Asian and African nations (and I don't mean Asian nations like Japan). We can even look at figures for the 'poorest counties' and that's even worse (though not representative and likely skewed due to various other reasons).

Posted by: Dude... Real Men Watch Ponies! | November 30, 2010 4:16 PM

The data is kind of misleading. The income axis goes from 400 to 4000 to 40000? Sure the basic trends are the same, but there is still an ENORMOUS difference between each country past the 4000 mark and even worse across the whole graph.

It also shows a relative difference. Those with yearly income of 40,000 would find a difference of about 100 to be fairly negligible. While those with income of say 400 would find 100 to be a large difference. Log scales helps highlight those differences (smalle changes in lower scale is more noticeable then the same change in the higher part of the scale).

Posted by: Dude... Real Men Watch Ponies! | November 30, 2010 4:25 PM

Hm, GapMinder doesn't seems to have data on religion.

Posted by: 'Tis Himself, OM | November 30, 2010 4:32 PM

Gapminder and the built-in statistics are interesting. I'll be wasting a few hours playing with it. Plus I see I can enter my own data.

Posted by: Dude... Real Men Watch Ponies! | November 30, 2010 4:33 PM

@DDavis

I don't know, check out GapMinder and compare the default with the one in video (Life Expectancy vs Income). They're identical (minus some minor visual elements).

The google motion chart looks like the gapminder visualizer made into a gadget for google spreadsheet.

Posted by: Dude... Real Men Watch Ponies! | November 30, 2010 4:38 PM

@DDavis #57
Extension to post #62
GapMinder Link
Despite the long url, this is the default setup for Gapminder World. You can see that both scale (minus a few finer scales missing in video), the time period shown, the animation, color and circle size representation (default is pop size) are all identical.

Posted by: Dude... Real Men Watch Ponies! | November 30, 2010 4:47 PM

Hm, seems to need quite a few post, keep finding new things quickly.
@DDavis #57
Extension to post #62 and #63
Now I'm pretty sure that it's GapMinder the video used.
http://www.gapminder.org/faq_frequently_asked_questions/
The google motion tool you posted were called Trendanalyzer, which was used by GapMinder before it was sold to Google.
And
http://www.gapminder.org/about-gapminder/staff/
Hans Rosling is the director of GapMinder.

Posted by: rufus_t | November 30, 2010 5:51 PM

It's worth pointing out that the BBC (especially BBC2 & BBC4) also have a longstanding relationship with the Open University (to describe them as the largest university in the UK is an understatement, they not only have the most students, but more students than the second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth largest universities combined).

They are probably the pioneers of broadcast science at a university level that is comprehendable to people outside the subject area in question, back in the days before they could stick educational broadcasts on video or DVD and post them to students. I can still remember my mum getting up at some unfeasable hour of a Saturday morning to watch the broadcast for the maths course that she was doing.
The only drawback was that the courses were only completely redone every ten years or so, meaning that phenomena like the kipper tie were still regular features on their broadcasts long after they'd dissapeared elsewhere.

Posted by: Some bloke or another | November 30, 2010 5:57 PM

@61

Sort of. A lot of people don't like it because the BBC is funded by a license fee, which is (theoretically) paid by all TV set-owning-households, whether they watch the channels or not, with the same fund providing for radio services and the website. The same people who complain about having to pay for the beeb often believe that it has a liberal bias in its news reporting (now where have we heard that before?). Basically, it's bad because it's not a relentlessly capitalist enterprise pandering to the lowest common denominator. These are, of course, the exact breed of people who think that taxes are an affront, public services are a right (and need to be improved) and fail to see the logical disconnect.

I do hate people sometimes.

Posted by: Moggie | November 30, 2010 6:19 PM

#28:

He could have done his sword swallowing trick.

Good grief, you weren't joking! He actually does that! The guy is made of awesome!

Could we interest Mooney in this technique, I wonder?

Posted by: Epikt | November 30, 2010 7:00 PM

Fred The Hun:

I think Hans Rosling still has on, both his blinders and his rose colored glasses. I very much doubt his vision of a peaceful progressive future for humanity , especially for the next 200 or so years.

QFT. I pretty much expect the big yellow US bubble to screech to a halt, then go rocketing back towards the origin just as fast as the teabaggers/antivaxxers/agw denialsts/godbots can manage.

Posted by: Beatrice, anormalement indécente | November 30, 2010 7:17 PM

#75, That was supposed to be my heart not hearth ..stupid

Posted by: captsam | November 30, 2010 7:59 PM

pretty neat hu........very neat.

Posted by: SteveV, Death's Pissant Haberdasher | November 30, 2010 8:17 PM

I wonder how much of the increase in life expectancy is due to the spread of evidence based medicine ?

IIRC increase in life expectancy (at least in the west) correlates more strongly with infrastrucure improvments (water and sewage systems, transport networks etc) than with medical advances.
My google fu is offline though (it is 01.15), so no citation at this time.
G/night.

Posted by: ibyea | November 30, 2010 9:15 PM

So, did anyone notice the Irish potato famine? It is really hard to see because the dot is small, but around the late 1840s, you can see a country really quickly go below the chart.I checked with the web page, and yeah, it was Ireland.

Posted by: James | November 30, 2010 9:53 PM

"The only drawback was that the courses were only completely redone every ten years or so, meaning that phenomena like the kipper tie were still regular features on their broadcasts long after they'd dissapeared elsewhere.

- rufus_t"

Ah, the good old Open Uni programmes. I remember watchng those on the TV whilst freezing my arse off trying to get the sodding fire lit in the living room. For years it was the only thing on the TV that was worth watching at that time on a Saturday morning, kids TV having yet to take off on a Saturday. You remember the kipper ties, I remember the hair, the beards and the shirts. To this day I still equate intelligence with the hair, the beard and the shirts, and whilst I don't have the hair anymore I am proud to say I have a beard (although not a OU episode filmed circa 1976 beard) and wear a shirt (ditto - not a 1976 shirt), even for casual wear.

Posted by: summitwulf | November 30, 2010 11:00 PM

A substantial proportion of the British public enjoy learning something new and interesting from their hours spent in front of the television. Over the years, the BBC has done exceptionally well in this regard; it really uses television as a medium to provide programs that are of such good quality that they can truly educate and enlighten the viewer.

I find this in stark contrast to the bilge that pretends to the same in the US.

Posted by: https://me.yahoo.com/a/2WTs7ZsrpIHTKihob3v2es8wEMG7Mmo-#60d8b | December 1, 2010 1:57 AM

@59, there are HUGE discrepancies in the cost of living. A person who makes 10,000 a year in many parts of the world has a far higher standard of living than a person who makes 10,000 in the US, because the cost of things like food, housing, clothing, medical care, etc. are all dramatically higher. Pure dollar amounts tell you little unless you control for cost of living.

@87, no, they had to do farm work and didn't go to college until their mid twenties? However could anyone survive? I have little pity for people crying about having to live like their fellow citizens were already living. Also, have you ever actually looked at the status of US education and labour at that same time? Guess what, of my grandparents (either your parents had you older or I am just younger than you, my grandmother was in her twenties in the 60s), three out of four did hard physical labour and had no access at all to university education. My one grandfather did farm labour from early childhood until his sixties. My other grandfather did factory labour until it killed him (he died as the result of cancers caused by exposure to dangerous chemicals in factories). One of my grandmothers, a brilliant woman who skipped a year in high school and graduated first in her class, with her older brother second, had no educational opportunities at all, because she was a poor woman of color. It kills me to hear this bullshit about how university attendees are the smartest when only a tiny, tiny portion of the population is ever given that chance at all. My grandmother who had no opportunity for higher education was far more intelligent than my one wealthy grandparent, who had easy access to a four year degree (which she did not really want and never used). It is not because of the difference in these two women's intelligence that one went to university, lived comfortably, stayed at home and raised her children, and retired to a nice house in Florida and the other never had a chance for a university education, had an extremely low standard of living, did factory work as well as seamstress work while raising her children, and did not live to see sixty five (her brother, who stayed on the reservation, died in his early forties). The difference between them was class and race, it was wealthy and white vs poor and Cherokee. This is still true today. The greatest predictor of a child's future access to education is the income class in which they are born. I have lived in rural poor farming and factory communities, and I went to an expensive private university for undergraduate (on scholarships and loans, the latter obtained in large part because of my wealthy grandmother's cosigning, something not available to many) the wealthy students, those 'intellectual elite' were no smarter than those 'red necks' I grew up with and they were far lazier on average. Also, your average university professor is far less meaningfully productive than your average farmer or factory work. Tell me, did you wear and eat a book about F. Scott Fitzgerald's literary works today? Didn't think so.

Posted by: tielserrath | December 1, 2010 2:37 AM

Yahoomess #81:

Oh, god, we're on to the 'only what puts food in your starving belly is real work', are we?

Makes me feel sorry for poor old Ugg, the first caveman who painted an animal on his cave wall. They probably cuffed him round the ear and told him to do 'real' work, too.

We have a huge, vibrant and complex society, and there are certainly many of us who have missed meals or otherwise gone without in order to afford a book, go to the theatre or take singing lessons. Your arguments about undervaluing people because of class and colour are valid. Your Fitzgerald statement is a load of balls.

Posted by: yanshen71786 | December 1, 2010 3:16 AM

Perhaps yahooness would've sent the likes of Fitzgerald to work alongside the peasants on the communal farms, where Fitzgerald would be doing "real work". ;)

Posted by: Puddock | December 1, 2010 5:16 AM

We still have plenty of rubbish TV over here - even the titles of some of them make my skin crawl - but BBC4 is splendid. If you can, check out Only Connect, which is a fiendish BBC4 quiz show, and becoming a bit of a cult amongst students.

Posted by: havecoffeewillwrite | December 1, 2010 7:49 AM

Shalom PZ,

The video is marvelously well done, but I disagree with Hans Rosling’s conclusion that the trend will pull the world towards wealth and health. We live in a closed system and the more we move to the upper right the more we tax that system. In the absence of restraint collapse is inevitable.

B'shalom,

Jeff

Posted by: John Morales | December 1, 2010 9:50 PM

havecoffeewillwrite:

We live in a closed system and the more we move to the upper right the more we tax that system.

You have a point, but you rely on ceteris paribus. We live in the Solar System, and technology is ever-improving.

Posted by: https://me.yahoo.com/a/NNElX.lopoxuMge1_bGvXqFvnkbkcEId0Nbpsg--#c96d1 | December 7, 2010 12:26 PM

Statistical dross. Take the US for example. The income range across all US citizens probably encompasses all the the horizontal scale, with attendeant variation in health status. Yet some touchy-feely average is used placing the US 'on average' towards the upper right.

Still, shiny pictures and moving blobs should satisfy PZ and his minions