A man intrigued by data, statistics and evidence
AT THE VERY first UN World Data Forum hosted by Statistics South Africa (StatsSA) in January last year, we had the benefit of being addressed by Swedish medical professor Hans Rosling, albeit briefly.
He passed on a month later after a battle with a rare cancer.
In April, the world will be treated to the launch of his posthumous book titled Factfulness.
The book is authored by himself, his son Ola and daughter-in-law Anna.
Launches to be held in Stockholm, New York and London.
Rosling said he would have possibly died 35 years ago had he not been born in a country where medical care was accessed by all income groups on an equal footing. The world would not have benefited from this visionary had he been born where medical care was not public and free.
He founded the Gapminder Foundation and revolutionised the world of data.
He worked in poor countries such as Mozambique, treating diseases such as malaria.
And like Florence Nightingale, he was intrigued by data, statistics and evidence. The more he pursued evidence, the closer he got to official statistics, a platform each self-respecting state applies, or dare I say, should apply, as a central feature of its public administration.
But to his dismay he discovered that very little attention was given to this arm of many a state.
He then looked at how this evidential base can be applied for better outcomes.
Together with Ola and Anna, Rosling would initiate a data revolution in the late 1990s, much earlier than Ban Ki Moon, the UN secretary-general, would call for it.
He propelled this to the UN Statistics Commission in the mid-2000s. He always argued for the beauty of statistics, while lamenting the backwardness of official statistical practices in countries.
He emphasised the art of the visualisation of phenomena and used this to illustrate how long-held beliefs and myths mislead the world – the world of own facts, self-talk and misinformation.
Like German philosopher Helmut Spinner, Rosling saw in statistics and data a strong democratic tool. He introduced ignorance surveys, wherein his inquisitive, but lethally humorous mind, compared knowledge levels between human beings and chimpanzees.
He ran these surveys in Sweden, US, China and South Africa.
Lecture series In South Africa, his son Ola presented the results during the ISIbalo Annual lecture of 2015.
This is a lecture series that StatsSA dedicates to advance public knowledge of evidence.
The brilliance and humour of the test of human knowledge against chimpanzees is that against any three possible answers – ABC to a question – there is a banana placed and a chimpanzee has to choose the answer by picking a banana. The answers would naturally be distributed evenly across the possible three for every question. Human beings, on the other hand, depending on their biases, level of common sense and ignorance will show higher or lower scores from a third.
Ola found that chimpanzees fared much better in these surveys than Americans and Swedes. The Chinese and South Africans fared better than the chimpanzees.
Rosling believed that public statistics are crucial to eliminating public ignorance and official statistics must be at the forefront of public knowledge creation, dissemination and use.
In their book Factfulness, Rosling, Ola and Anna argued against the popular belief of a world getting worse, whereas the world today is a better place than it was 50 years ago or even 100 years ago, based on facts. The world has never been better than it is today. Human beings live longer and healthier than ever before.
Most killer diseases have been eliminated by modern medical science; incomes are higher; but inequalities are increasing.
The inequalities illustrate that the world is no longer north and south, but that in each country there is a montage of north and south.
In this revelation, the state is a contested being in which students of the political economy can find solace more so than Engels, Marx and Lenin did in their time.
They can indulge in the wealth of statistical analysis to put paid the existence of the centre-periphery and neo-colonialism phenomena, including the need and call for workers around the world to unite as capital fights for its last stage of existence.
The Roslings show through disaggregation – what one would call geographically weighted regression analysis – that applying a differentiated policy approach within countries is the way to go.
In this regard their immersion into official statistics reveals the beauty of statistics and why this specific knowledge base that is rotting on shelves in national offices should be brought to life and inform society better.
Like Tukufu Zuberi, of Pennsylvania University, made it his task to revive census data locked on tapes that were deemed unreadable in Africa, Rosling demonstrates that the shine on data is immortal.
I once had a lengthy discussion with Rosling on public numbers. He implored me to point the Gapminder Foundation to Africa, because this is where the biggest impact of public statistics in changing lives will occur. His book is a landmark publication for statistics and especially for official statistics – the slumbering giant.
The inequalities illustrate that the world is no longer north and south, but that in each country there is a montage of north and south.