Hans Rosling Poverty TED Talk

When Hans Rosling stepped on stage he stepped up with a purpose, and that was to show the world that the impoverished nations of the world are not hopeless. When he finished his TED talk, I was thoroughly convinced of this point. The hope that these third world nations are showing in recent trends is actually quite incredible, and the chance they have to level the playing field with big industrial nations may not be so much of a fantasy anymore.

The trends that Hans Rosling showed for the impoverished nations of this world is that they may be actually be progressing at a faster rate than industrial nations are now. The infant mortality rate for countries with lesser income is decreasing to the levels that the elite nations of this world are at, and the rates are lower for the impoverished nations per capita than at the time many elite nations were at that same per capita. This may actually mean that the countries that the elite nations of the world such as the United States and Great Britain write off may actually be the ones that have the potential to overtake them. Whether this rate keeps the same trend or not is still in question, but the gist of the matter is that third world nations are for real and have a shot to be great just like developed nations.

Hans Rosling does a great job of analyzing data and presenting it in a complex form that people still can comprehend. He compiled data from a span of over 150 years to pour into his presentation, and still used all of the complex parts of it to explain the point that the impoverished nations of the world are not given enough credit. He uses a program which tracks data and displays it in a bar graph, and in turn displays this program and other graphics in a power point format. This is effective in his presentation because it doesn't make the audience simply comprehend the data by hearing it, but allows them also to look at the data. Yet another tactic Hans uses in his presentation is his sense of humor. Humor it seems is a must in presentations because it is nearly impossible to keep an audience focused on the pure explanation of the point that is trying to be made for an extended period of time. One has to reel them back in at points, which is where humor can come into play.

While this speech I don't think means overly much for education, it means a lot for the world. The inequalities of this world are quite obvious and pretty easy to discriminate against. The world needs to accept the fact that people are people no matter how poor, and that no matter how far below the poverty level these people are they still have the same potential as the people who have it all.