by Hans Rosling
Many public-health experts are deeply suspicious of private enterprise, believing it is all about flogging tobacco and alcohol products or fast cars. After giving so many lectures to staff in private-sector organizations, I acquired a respect for commerce that I had previously lacked because of my working-class background.
We received more and more invitations to demonstrate our new, fact-based representations of the world. We were asked to speak at conferences all over the world and also had a terrific number of requests for computer-based images of other statistical data sets. Almost all the organizations contacting us had built large databases only to find it hard to convey the meaning of their data—they ranged from UNESCO, the World Bank, and UNICEF to the Swedish local authorities and Rio de Janeiro’s town planners.
If we had been capitalists at heart, we would surely have jumped at the chance to sign contracts with all these interested parties but, as Anna concisely expressed it, our vision of liberating this data was too huge for us to manage on our own. We agreed that the best thing would be if Google were to steal our ideas, because they did not charge users for their services.
In 2006, barely three years after my first presentation to the heads of Swedish industries, I was invited to give my first TED Talk. Anna and Ola had actually been invited a year earlier to what was at the time a secret conference for handpicked delegates and which had not yet put a single video on YouTube. But the TED Talk people refused on principle to pay airfares, trying instead to persuade Anna and Ola what a huge honor it was to be invited at all. To which they had replied: “Sorry, but we can’t afford the flights.”
Before my first TED presentation, I phoned Anna and Ola to discuss the content.
“What about sword swallowing?” I asked, referring to a party trick of mine.
“No, don’t do that,” Ola advised. “Run the chimp test and then show them the visuals.”
It was an incredible success. I was even on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle.
The following year I was invited to talk at TED again and, true to habit, I phoned Anna and Ola to ask their advice: “What have I got to show them now?”
“Nothing new, so you had better swallow a sword or two,” Ola said.
The actor Meg Ryan had a front-row seat. She cheered loudly and jumped up and down when I pulled the sword from my throat and bowed to the audience. I still regard Meg Ryan’s cheering as one of my greatest triumphs.
An unassuming-looking man with a long fringe was hovering quietly among the many people who wanted to speak to me after the talk. He turned out to be Larry Page, one of the founders of Google. Unlike most of the other attendees, he had realized right away that I was unlikely to have written the code for my bubble graphs myself. I told him about Anna and Ola, who were promptly invited to Google headquarters along with the programmers working with them at Gapminder, the not-for-profit foundation we had founded. Once installed at Google, they would be able to turn Anna’s vision of democratic access to official statistics into reality. The Gapminder Foundation sold the moving-bubble source code to Google and for three years, Anna and Ola worked in the company’s Silicon Valley building. Their goal was to create and shape Google Public Data, an application that makes it much easier to find and display statistics.
* * *
The proceeds of the sale meant that I finally dared to leave academia. In 2007, I severed almost all links with scientific research, keeping just 10 percent of my post at the Karolinska Institute and devoting 90 percent of my working time to Gapminder. My title there was “edutainer.” I employed a new team and we started to put short films up on YouTube.
* * *
Over the years that followed, my office was flooded with invitations to lecture all over the world. The pressure was such that I had to engage an assistant. I was constantly asked to speak at conferences, of which some were recurring events and others were one-offs. The latter included a US State Department get-together in Washington DC, where I addressed the foreign affairs specialists with a talk I called “Let my data set change your mindset.”
With the founders of Google
One day, an email arrived from Melinda Gates: would I attend a conference in New York focusing on the United Nations’ developmental goals and especially on child mortality. I agreed, of course.
When you are asked to give a talk, you must first make sure you are clear about one thing: what precisely is my subject? Next, you must work out how to illustrate it and what is the best way to display the material. What do I want my audience to remember? I left for New York without having made up my mind about any of this.
My assistant and I arrived, as planned, a day early. I like being in place in good time and to then prepare thoroughly up to the very last minute—it helps me to memorize what I want to say. I always want access to the space to get an idea of the layout and familiarize myself with things like where my laptop will go and where the cable should run. These technical details matter very much to me. Many speakers cannot be bothered and leave their slides in the hands of someone else. I never do. The timing is much better if you are responsible for pressing the button. It gives your talk the pace it needs.
The night before the conference began, I had been invited to a dinner in a restaurant in lower Manhattan, south of UN headquarters.
I was a little uncertain about what to wear. I knew that Graça Machel would be present. She had been the minister of education in Mozambique during the years Agneta and I were there. At the time, she had been married to the president of Mozambique. These days, she was married to Nelson Mandela. Melinda Gates would also be at the dinner.
I chose a jacket but no tie. In my bag, I carried something very precious to me: my daughter Anna’s school notepad, carrying the logo of the Mozambican Ministry of Education. My arrival at the restaurant was overwhelming: I had been seated in a central position, next to Graça Machel, with Melinda Gates facing me.
The conversation that evening was quiet but profound and witty, especially the exchanges between Melinda and Graça. They discussed all the great issues of international development. I joined in now and then but mostly listened as these two giants of world policy talked about girls’ rights to education, access to contraception, distribution of vaccines in rural areas, the furthering of democratic governance, and whether social development must be achieved before political change is possible—and, in every context, what the UN could do and what the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation could do. I was fascinated by the way they talked. They were obviously close friends, almost like sisters. Having met so often, and sharing the same values, they knew each other’s projects in detail.
Both were deeply concerned about the issues surrounding access to contraception. Melinda felt that the matter should be seen not in terms of human rights but as an intervention in support of family life—for one thing, people grasp that family life will be easier if the children are not born too close together. Graça saw the question from a South African perspective: there, arguing in favor of using contraception was less controversial than in Mozambique, which had experienced extreme poverty so recently. For me, it was a privilege to listen as people with the capacity to make a difference in the world peacefully discuss what best to do next.
Every now and again the two women asked me questions. Among other things, I told them about how to measure child mortality. I described how you had to select a representative female population from the country in question and then arrange for qualified interviewers to ask them about their lives. The questions were probing: for example, how had life been for them during the last few years, had they lost children and, if so, how. This approach enabled us to investigate child mortality in depth.
Graça and Melinda listened attentively and asked me about some critical issues. I told them there was no doubt that most African countries were developing in the right direction because the evidence was there in the form of decreasing child mortality.
Toward the end of the evening, when
I felt that we had been getting on very well, I decided it was now or never.
“I would like to show you something. And to thank you,” I said to Graça. Melinda peered over the table to see what I had in my hand. I pulled out Anna’s school notebook. I spoke about our time in Mozambique from 1979 to 1981 and explained that our daughter had been to school there. Graça Machel’s eyes grew wide. “Did you meet my husband?”
“No, but I heard a speech he gave in Nampula,” I said.
The notebook caused quite a stir. Everyone wanted to have a look.
“It was the education minister who saw to it that my daughter went to school,” I said, while the notebook was handed around the table.
As I walked back through Manhattan that evening I made little elated leaps. Talking with these two women had given me such a high.
The dinner stayed with me as the greatest memory of the trip. It had humbled me. My preconceived notion had been that people in high places were shallow and egotistical. I had thought ill of them, in general, and expected arrogance. Instead, I had met wise, thoughtful and kind individuals.
* * *
That dinner conversation also taught me how important personal contacts always are, even at the most elevated social levels. It was an insight that was strengthened every time I attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, an annual event where the power brokers of the world meet to discuss the big issues of the future. It has grown into the world’s largest assembly of people who hold power—those active in industry, economics, and finance as well as politicians, heads of state, representatives of international organizations including the UN and organizations such as Amnesty, leading media figures, and academic experts in global issues.
Davos is an ordinary-looking Alpine town with a modest railway station. It had snowed that morning and as Agneta and I pulled our wheeled suitcases along I slipped and slithered on the steep, icy street.
Before long, I found myself seated in a small meeting room, listening to a minister for the environment from an EU country. He was in an accusatory mood:
“The bulk of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions come from China, India, and the other developing economies, and projections show they are rising at a rate that will cause very dangerous climate change. China already releases more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than the USA, and India releases more than Germany.”
The minister was a member of the group of politicians and industrialists discussing climate change at Davos in January 2007. His statement about the CO2 emissions from China and India was made in a neutral, unemotional tone, as if his view was purely factual. I scanned the small meeting room: Europeans and Americans were seated along one side of the table while delegates from the rest of the world, including India and China with their rapidly growing economies, were lined up along the other side. The Chinese civil servant kept staring straight ahead but his shoulders were drawn up and his neck seemed somehow locked as he listened to what the EU minister had to say. His Indian counterpart was leaning forward and waving to catch the moderator’s attention.
When the Indian minister was called upon to speak, he stood calmly for a moment. He wore an elegant navy-blue turban and a dark gray suit. In silence, he looked around the table at each of the other countries’ representatives, gazing at the CEO of one of the largest oil companies for a little longer than the rest. As one of India’s most senior civil servants, he had many years of experience as an expert advisor to the World Bank and the IMF. After his brief but effective silence, he made a sweeping gesture toward the “wealthy” side of the table.
“We are in a delicate situation. That we are here at all is the fault of your countries, the wealthiest in the world! You fired your economies with coal and have been burning oil for centuries. Your activities—no one else’s—have brought us all to the brink of a major climate crisis,” he said loudly and aggressively, breaking all diplomatic codes.
Then his body language changed abruptly. He pressed the palms of his hands together in front of his chest in an Indian greeting, bowing to the shocked delegates from the West.
“But we forgive you because you did not know what you were doing.”
The words were spoken in a near-whisper. The audience was silent. There was a giggle from somewhere in the back. A few people exchanged anxious smiles.
The Indian minister straightened up again, stared at his opponents and wagged his finger at them.
“From today, we will base our calculations on CO2 emissions per capita.”
I was so impressed by the sharpness of his analysis that I can’t remember the reactions of others in the room. Over the years, I had become horrified at the way blame for causing climate change had been systematically heaped on India and China. The basis has been their total emissions, even though both countries have much larger populations than other countries. I had always thought it was a silly argument, analogous to stating that obesity was a more serious issue in China than in the USA because China’s total body mass was the bigger of the two. Given the huge differences in population size, it is pointless to speak of “total emissions per country.” Sweden, with ten million inhabitants, could by that logic get away with vastly increased CO2 emissions per capita because there are so few of us.
What the Indian civil servant expressed in public was something that had worried me for years. Is this really how they think, the men and women in power? But the way he said it made me hope that the restructuring of the world was on its way.
* * *
It is interesting to give lectures for company staff and focus on what they feel really matters. Sometimes I use links to my own past—for instance, to my grandma, who washed clothes in a laundry tub in a cement trough while dreaming of a washing machine.
I had been invited to give a talk to the management of a well-known white goods company. The CEO wanted me to demonstrate the world’s demographic and economic development and go on to explore the worldwide need for cookers, fridges, and washing machines.
I began with a simple display of how income distribution related to population health, pointing out that people become healthier first and that economic growth follows later. This progress means that today we can make qualified guesses about where development might take off, given a sufficiently good economic policy.
“Asia will be the next enormous marketplace. Latin America and the Middle East as well, but Africa will follow later. For you, expansion in Asia is what matters just now.”
Someone asked, “What do they want there, would you say?”
“You make electric cookers, mostly, but often gas is the cheaper fuel in poorer countries. A fridge is probably what households will invest in first; they’re much valued, especially in warm climates. But your firm makes expensive goods and people with lower incomes need cheaper things. I don’t know what you feel about that.
“Have you talked to your own relatives?” I went on. “Have you ever asked the oldest woman in the family how she felt when the washing machine was installed?”
I pointed at 1952 on the graph displayed behind me. “Here is when Swedish families got their first washing machines. We were then at the stage China is at today. Imagine the market—1.3 billion people.”
A washing machine is a product that many people in the world would love to own. Imagine that! If you could make washing-machine ownership match mobile-phone ownership, which has spread worldwide.
“What is lacking is a technological breakthrough. The old types of washing machine use too much water, and that will not sell in densely populated Asian countries. Add to this the problem of using detergents and other chemicals, and don’t forget the demands on the electricity supply.”
They listened. “How will you deal with these problems?” I asked. “Can you think up something as smart as the mobile phone? Once you do, you can access billions of customers. This isn’t about ‘corporate social responsibility’; it’s about your future profits! Unless you get on with redesigning your product, you will lo
se the leading position in the marketplace.”
The arguments inside the corporation became clear: opposing sides wanted either to hang on to old market shares in the West or try out simpler models and gain more customers in new markets. I have rarely seen so distinctly the difference facts can make.
I had spoken to them using the same facts as I had shown to the UN and aid organizations. But I presented them from the producers’ point of view. I had just scratched the surface of their outdated view of the world.
* * *
In 2011, when our children had grown up and moved out and three decades had passed since we had lived in Mozambique, we decided to return. After flying from Maputo we rented a car in Nampula and drove toward Nacala. On the way, we passed the place where I had almost died in a car accident. We stopped and stared. It looked just the same: grass and mud. But, as soon as we entered the outskirts of Nacala, we started noticing changes. The town had expanded into the countryside with large industrial sites surrounded by nicely painted walls. A truck swung out onto the road in front of us. It was loaded to the top with colorful, patterned foam-rubber mattresses wrapped in transparent plastic. Ah, at last, I thought. At last people can make love on something soft rather that hard-trodden dirt floors. At last, modernization. That truck seemed symbolic. The port of Nacala had grown to be the industrial city we had hoped it would become. But the really amazing moment for us was returning to the hospital.
We parked on the sloping road leading down into the center. We recognized all the hospital buildings, except one: it was tiny and looked like a small kiosk. The door was covered in posters. One of them showed a man hitting a woman, with a cross through the scene. The door stood open and we peeped inside. We saw a man busy entering things on paper, seated at a dark wooden desk. A fragile-looking, plainly dressed woman of about twenty-five was standing in front of him, wearing flip-flops. Her eyes were frightened.
