Summary on the Video "Let my dataset change your mindset" by Hans Rosling

Let my dataset change your mindset" by Hans Rosling is an informative video on research done over the past 100 years about the relation between health and success of various countries and regions. Rosling speaks about how misinterpretations have been made over other regions in the world. He proves his point right by showing data sets of countries and GDP. In most instances, regions such as Europe and North America were on the high scale of most graphs. Africa was usually one of the lowest.

Rosling's students defined Western World as a long life in a small family and a developing world is a short life in a large family. This means that the people which has large families had a shorter life expectancy due to limited resources and vice versa. They inherited these assumptions and preconceptions on world view from their teachers and the year from which they were born. 


When Rolsing breaks down the regional bubbles on his graphs into smaller bubbles that represent countries, their is a vast difference because the regional bubbles are higher on child survival rate making Africa the lowest on the child survival rate. Once the bubbles split into specific countries, Africa's countries get even lower from the before average of 80%. The new average of the countries within Africa drop to 70 percent (that being Sierra Leone).


The data set that Rosling represents challenges assumptions about global health because in general, the more prosperous nations have higher health and survival rates. Throughout the development of the world, Rosling's data set shows that the impoverished regions/countries catch up to the more prosperous nations. Rosling calls this "development" convergence because it's not exactly a development in the world, but a convergence of equal health and prosperity. Rosling also shocks the audience by showing that the more prosperous countries in Africa have higher HIV rates possibly due to situations faced with their heterosexual partners. He begs for people not to make the HIV "epidemic" a race issue because its not just all African poor people; his data set shows that the outlook we, as the more prosperous nations, had were wrong because we thought that the epidemic for survival was severe all over Africa, which is not true. 


As Rosling is demonstrating, the audience gets a sense that the more research we do in specificity, then the more we would learn about the assumptions we've had. Rosling gives a sense of hope in his speech because he shows that the convergence has moved in significant rates within the past100 years. By having the "industrialized" nations provide aid for the "developing" nations, we can have a complete convergence into a fairly equal world, in terms of health and survival. I agree with Roslings research because we, especially as Americans, have a mindset that is wrong because we're not developing, but we're converging. 






Bibliography

Rosling, H. (2009). Let my dataset change your mindset. TED Talks. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVhWqwnZ1eM