Watch this explanation by Hans Rosling - and read the transcript - partly reproduced here.
This is great series by some of the world's greatest thinkers.
I still remember the day in school when our teacher told us that the world population had become three billion people. And that was in 1960. And I'm going to talk now about how world population has changed from that year and into the future. But I will not use digital technology as I've done during my first five TEDTalks. Instead, I have progressed. And I am, today, launching a brand new analog teaching technology that I picked up from Ikea: this box.
This box contains contains one billion people. And our teacher told us that the industrialized world, 1960, had one billion people. In the developing [world], she said, they had two billion people. And they lived away then. There was a big gap between the one billion in the industrialized world and the two billion in the developing world. The industrialized world, people were healthy, educated, rich, and they had small families. And their aspiration was to buy a car. And in 1960, all Swedes were saving to try to buy a Volvo like this. This was the economic level at which Sweden was. But in contrast to this, the developing world, far away, the aspiration of the average family there was to have food for the day. And they were saving to be able to buy a pair of shoes. There was an enormous gap in the world when I grew up. And this gap between the West and the rest has created a mindset of the world which we still use linguistically when we talk about "the West" and "the developing world." But the world has changed, and it's overdue to upgrade that mindset and that taxonomy of the world, and to understand it.
And that's what I'm going to show you. Because since 1960, what has happened in the world up to 2010 is that a staggering four billion people have been added to the world population. Just look how many
No comments:
Post a Comment