Not to be missed! Contrasting the health and wealth of nations #dmingml

Discovered an incredible site today as a result of conducting a search on some of the work of Hans Rosling.

As part of my Doctoral program at GFU, I have been part of numerous discussions on economics, politics and the benefits and negative aspects of capitalism, the rise of poverty and how it is sustained, transformational principles of development, community engagement, etc. Of course, these are not merely academic in nature, but have pushed us to a point where each of us contemplates our own situations and how we might apply the insights we glean to those contexts.

Books written by Weber and Polanyi have been challenging reads for me, and have reminded me of how easy it is to simply go along with changing shifts and trends in our culture without understanding their origins and what factors existed in our culture that allowed those things to either develop or decline. Without appreciating this, I am not sure we can adequately understand how we should respond to (and in some cases, resist) their implications for society today. For example, I am comfortable with the concept of capitalism, but uncomfortable with capitalism that is not regulated and leads to unrestrained greed and abuse that is derogatory to individuals and communities. We have seen the impact of this on life expectancy, education, health, wealth, etc.

Now, let me introduce Hans Rosling. He is a Swedish doctor, academic, statitician and public speaker, with multiple talks and videos available on You Tube. He is also the Professor of International health at Karolinska Institute and Director of the Gapminder Foundation, which developed the Trendalyzer.

I have included a link to a graph (as seen on some amazing presentation technology that shows how long people live and how much money they earn over a period of 200 years. There are other dynamic graphs available that also contrast countries and regions throughout history as it relates to:

• Life Expectancy
• Health
• Wealth
• Education
• Unemployment
• Many more....

Click the play button to watch in 4 minutes how 200 countries have developed in 200 years.

http://www.gapminder.org/