Why the Statistics Point Toward Progress

Hans Rosling, a Swedish physician and thinker, argues that the recession is just a tiny setback

Rosling uses dramatic charts to map worldwide economic gains Stephen Voss

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Hans Rosling offers an antidote to people grown weary of pessimism. Videos of the 61-year-old Swedish doctor and medical professor have drawn well over 1 million views on YouTube (GOOG). His specialty: harnessing statistics to illustrate dramatically how economic progress has made the world better. Using a bubble to represent each country, his charts map rapid gains across the globe on his Gapminder.org Web site. While Rosling, a co-founder of Doctors Without Borders, also studies scourges such as the HIV epidemic, he argues that history offers cause for hope. He has seen horrors: tracking a rare paralytic disease, konzo, for years in rural Africa, for instance. But he has seen progress: He sleuthed out konzo's cause—hunger and poorly processed cassava—thus helping prevent the disease from spreading. Chief of Correspondents Joseph Weber recently spoke with Rosling.

You've tracked such measures as income, fertility, oil consumption, and bad teeth across the globe. What do your data show about the speed and evenness of progress?
They show convergence. Most countries are slowly becoming more similar. It is shocking to some. I looked at the basic family realities: How many children do you have? How do they survive? Much of the world is already similar—two to three children and an average longevity of more than 65 years. One of my favorite comparisons is between the U.S. and Vietnam. In terms of life span and family size, Vietnam is just one generation behind. If you look at paychecks, it's four generations behind.

You've found this is typical for most of Asia and the Arab world.
It's surprising that so many big countries, like Egypt and Brazil, have lowered child mortality 50% to 100% faster than Sweden ever did. And Sweden gave development money to China up to last year! You can provide a lot of things to China, but they don't need development money. They are the ones lending to the U.S., so why should Sweden give them money?

The recession has swept the globe with extraordinary speed. Will recovery be as swift?
I use International Monetary Fund projections. When I take the country bubbles back to 1970 and run the world projections forward to 2014, you hardly see the crisis. It's just like a short tango. The world has taken two steps backward, some countries more than others, but China [following its own upward path] does not tango!

This crisis may mean a faster catch-up for China.
The big risk with this crisis is that the world gets shortsighted, and we don't address the major long-term issues such as trade imbalances and subsidies for agriculture that hurt poorer countries. In post-industrial societies, the economy is about developments a quarter ahead. In India and China, they think in [terms of] decades and generations.

In the long sweep—say, 25 to 50 years—how do you believe this recession will rank?
It depends on what happens in the streets in Tehran and the mountains of Pakistan. Things can go very wrong. But we have to thank [former] President George Bush for seeing that the power has shifted from the G7 to the G20. [In 2008 he invited leaders from the world's top 20 economic powers to a summit in Washington.] The top 20 world leaders now have the ability to speak to one another. China and the U.S. can discuss and coordinate stimulus packages.

As a result of this recession, would you expect the U.S. to fall behind other countries?
We don't need to worry about falling behind. It wasn't bad for Sweden when Finland got wealthy. It isn't bad for the U.S. that Canada is wealthy and healthy. It is not a matter of falling behind, but to rise and live together.

Is there any cause for celebration now?
The rise of the G20. The arrogance and backward-looking attitude of the West has come to an end.

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