Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Wealth, population and health: do you agree with Rosling's conclusions? ... by gimleteye

5 comments:

Geniusofdespair said...

I liked the video!

Anonymous said...

Neat video and yes I do agree with his premise. It is encouraging to see that poor countries are begining to move off the low end. My concern is that the US will sink.

Anonymous said...

I would have liked to have seen a comparison of countries with universal health care programs and how that closes the gap within the countries between the rich and the poor. Unfortunately, we may never see that in the US. The rich will continue to thrive while the poor will continue to die. And now the small gains that we have seen recently will disappear if our newly elected Congress gets their way.

CATO said...

Gains? Please Republicrats are no prize but Obamacare was an absolute Obamanation of the principles that made this country once great.
We are now nothing more than a sniveling european social democracy wannabe, with or without Obamacare.
Ever ask yourself why all the productive jobs left the US, please look further than knee jerk platitudes or economic fairy tales.

Beatriz Baldan said...

What I would like to see in that graphic are the disparities within the countries like he showed briefly in China, compared with the disparities two hundred years ago, and the disaster produced by the great depression of 1930’s and now.

About one hundred years ago Felix Adler, founder of the New York Society for Ethical Culture wrote:
“An anxious unrest, a fierce craving desire for gain has taken possession of the commercial world and in instances no longer rare the most precious and permanent goods of human life have been madly sacrificed in the interest of momentary enrichment”

Sound familiar, so, Rosling’s conclusions are very, very broad brush paint of the global economy that it does not take into consideration the value of good, purchase value of money, cost of production, etc, etc, etc, for example the vale of one dollar in 1926 and now is not the same, it does not have the same purchase value, meaning that a person with an annual income of $40,000 in 19206 was very, very well off, Today, depending on the size of the family and where you live, I would say that $40,000 you can hardly make it.

To compare the purchase value of the dollar, in 1926 the price of the Ford T was $290, the price of the most expensive four door sedan was $495.

Also, today, the purchase value of a dollar in USA is not the same that the purchase value of the same dollar in Mexico, or India.

In reality the Rosling’s beautiful and enchanting entertaining graphics are half truths because due to inflation, the purchase value of money goes down, therefore the remuneration amount goes up, but we are still roughly in the same boat. And due to this, his graphic will always go up and not necessarily meaning we are better off.

We are still in a much divided uneven world between the have and have not. The only way to lift all of us up and for all of us to be better is to engage in a non-zero game in which everybody wins.