The criticisms of Rosling seem to surround around him painting with a broad brush and forming distilled conclusions. The trouble is that if Rosling were to dive into the details of these data and leave out conclusions the average person listening would get lost, have no actionable thesis, or both. I would include myself to be among these people.
The admirable thing about his presentations are that he encourages his listeners to trust data and question their preconceptions.
Certainly his methodolgy is not perfect. However, given how the public forms decisions right now (See US presidential election), I can't help but think this mentality is exactly what is needed.
Amen. We have a lot of people digging through details in obscurity; we need a spokesman like this, of good will and broad understanding, instead of the usual shysters. There is a solid need for both roles; you don't criticize an epidemiologist for not being a surgeon.
Two things jumped out at me. First, I love the resolution in the opening story about the machete-wielding mob. The power of a single old woman to defuse a dangerous situation is fascinating. As a person in an industry built on the backs of youth, I sometimes wonder how wasteful we are being by focusing on the future and forgetting about the past.
Second, it seems that Rosling's great superpower is communication. I love the Radio Lab podcast and am a firm believer that for a scientist, being able to tell stories about what you do is almost as important as the science.
News is a business that needs to grab attention to survive, it has always had a built-in bias toward horrors and drama because those get attention. News rarely talks about how most things you care about are slowly and steadily getting better on average over time.
This is why I enjoyed reading The Economist. I might not have agreed with their editorial slant, but I loved how they didn't care much for human interest stories (or at least marginalised them) and did report on things slowly getting better all around the world.
(Stopped reading not because I was discontent, rather because of a lack of time.)
The Economist is also one of the most strongly opinionated magazines currently being published. Almost every article says, quite loudly, what they think governments should be doing with whatever problem they're describing. Whereas the NY Times, for example, is much more understated, and will, if they offer a solution (or opinion) at all, outline the various pros/cons and leave the reader to infer what they really think.
While I like The Economist a lot, my preferred source of reporting and analysis on news, culture and politics is The New York Review of Books. Their stable of superb, intellectual writers tackle all sorts of things (books, ironically, being pretty far down on the list) in a highly readable way. The Economist can get a little dry and monotonous after a while.
LRB is great, too. I prefer NYRB, though I can't pinpoint anything specific; it's just that in any given issue, LRB tends to have a higher ratio of articles that I find too dry and academic.
As you probably know, LRB was originally created by NYRB (it was initially published as a supplement), so they have a shared history and kinship. And of course, there are a ton of writers who are published in both, such as Tim Parks, Neal Ascherson, Tony Judt (RIP!) and Jonatham Lethem.
The only reason I don't read both faithfully is that there's just not enough time in the world.
"Possibilism" is a good way to think about the world: weighing what paths are opened by changes in scientific knowledge or human societies and what paths are blocked, but refusing to stay anchored to a conclusion just because it was true at one particular time in the past. It's unfortunate that "realist" has connotations of cynicism, because Rosling is a good realist in that he is more willing to discard conclusions than data.
I don't have any specific critisism of Rosling (He seems very capable in a lot of ways). I think the part that many people find problematic is that he doesnt just present himself as a scientist but as someone who can interpret the data. And not just a normal interpreter but someone who has insights that almost nobody else has. You can argue wether this is true, but the fact is that this gives him an insane amount of credibility, and a kind of power that a non-expert should maybe use a little more sparingly.
Cause v correlation. Symptom v disease. We don't struggle with "facts" as much as we too often fail to apply enough critical thinking to get the real story identified and in context.
My problem with Rosling is that he furthers one of the problems with our modern discourse; the assumption that a given dataset inevitably leads to one conclusion. It's not true. I wish it were but it isn't.
The same statistics about mass incarceration of African American males in the US that leads me to conclude that we have an issue of systemic racism leads far right people to conclude that African American males have an inherent tendency toward criminality. I would call that a gross misrepresentation of the data, but it is what happens.
Rosling, in my mind, is guilty of misrepresenting some data, and I'm sure in his mind my conclusions based on the same data are equally ill informed.
But Rosling tends, for me, not to make convincing arguments. He tends to throw up some graphs and say "Look! It's obvious we should do what I say!!"
Have you lived in central Africa? I have, for a decade. I saw first hand the catastrophic consequences of misguided "help".
You are responding about subtleties ("misrepresenting 'some' data") when the problem he's going after -- misguided feel-good intervention by the under informed, is more harmful than helpful -- is very real and bigger than any given issue.
You are down in the weeds debating this or that fact, instead, come up a level and help explain to others that understanding precedes helping -- which it sounds like you agree with, and is a more important point.
I find that people tend to look for a singular cause; a trail of evidence that leads to only one correct conclusion. It's an attitude exploited by crime dramas, TV shows, literature, etc.
Reality, of course, is far more complex, and I think Rosling is trying to play to those biases in human nature in order to influence people. Pointing to one inherent "truth" in the data is far more effective in convincing people than "it's complicated".
> Pointing to one inherent "truth" in the data is far more effective in convincing people than "it's complicated".
Yep and this is my biggest problem with populist "thinkers" like Gladwell and Rosling. They actually encourage the opposite of thinking; providing ready made simplistic conclusions for their audience.
Sure, but that's just human nature, and even if it weren't, there isn't enough time for everyone to understand everything. A civilization at our level of sophistication requires specialization. I think the best you can hope for is intellectual honesty from these guys.
His famous TED talk against doing anything about climate change (a position which I think he later rescinded?) and instead focusing those funds on health and poverty reduction instead is littered with it, and based on a false assumption to begin with; that there is a pile of money that is already set aside and we're all in charge of directing it.
The reality is far more complicated. We aren't taking money away from fighting Malaria when we raise taxes on gas guzzling cars, to give just one example.
I just explained that. He misrepresents the data by presenting it as an either or (either we fight climate change OR we fight poverty) when it isn't. That misrepresentation distorts how you interpret all the data in his talk.
I'm not interested in nit picking back and forth. Go defend Rosling to someone else.
> leads far right people to conclude that African American males have an inherent tendency toward criminality.
I think you're being uncharitable. Conservatives wouldn't claim that African American males have inherent criminality. That would be unbelievably racist on its own. They instead say that African American males are simply more likely to commit crimes, which seems statistically true, if a tad misleading.
Of course, you are both probably wrong and the true underlying cause is actually economic disparity, which would encompass both interpretations. People who are more poor simply commit more crimes out of desperation, and African Americans are poorer due to historical reasons stemming from racism.
i believe he said "far right". this could be interpreted as anything from tea party to neo nazis and fascists depending on what "far" means. However i wouldn't take it to be directed to all "Conservatives".
No, folks on the right like to look at some other stats to broaden our understanding. A favorite statistic on the right is the number of African American adult males who grow up in low income situations without a father who then commit crimes as an adult. This same increase happens with every other race who is in a low income situation without a father in the house.
Try not to throw dirt on others when making a point as people filter the point through the shade you cast.
The US has a lot of laws. People break them all the time. This doesn't frequently result in jail time.
Incarceration is determined by a combination of sentencing guidelines, public policy, access to adequate defence, policing, etc.
These factors actively shape our prison population. The War on Drugs, Three Strikes, etc have resulted in the US having the largest prison population (both in total and per capita) in the entire world. This is pretty objectively broken.
On top of this, we have a system that is stacked against certain groups and turn a blind eye to the fact that it perpetuates the cycle with broken homes and damaged communities.
When you look at the fact that we have more people locked up than any other nation and a growing prison population I'm not sure how a thoughtful answer can be more laws and Stricter enforcement.
i think we're more concerned with how it's more profitable to be fatherless on welfare and the high rate of out of wedlock births also encouraged by the current welfare rules. Their is a fairly large chunk of Republicans that are "rule of law" instead, and that makes quite a bit of difference. The problems with the justice system are the end not the root of the problem. Sadly, one justice problem which kills families is more prominent in Democratic lead cities: civil asset forfeiture. Philadelphia being the prime example.
I think culture also plays a role in explaining crime stats, not just poverty. Low income asian areas experience far fewer crime levels than corresponding low income black areas.
The admirable thing about his presentations are that he encourages his listeners to trust data and question their preconceptions.
Certainly his methodolgy is not perfect. However, given how the public forms decisions right now (See US presidential election), I can't help but think this mentality is exactly what is needed.