2010

The world is changing, mostly to the better but also to the worse. Some changes are expected but more are surprising and difficult to grasp! Changes to the worse are often swift; earthquakes and flooding, and they get media coverage.  True progress is mostly slower than backlash! Human rights are slowly improved but genocides can be brutally fast. To turn a population literate will require many, many decades.  It took Sweden 200 years to reduce the death rates in children from 300 to 3 per 1000 born. Singapore did the same in less than 80 years and many countries such as Bangladesh, Egypt, Brazil, and Turkey presently improve child survival faster than ever done in West Europe. Yet the change is happening too slow to reach the media.

Teaching misses the magnitude and speed of global changes by sticking to the old concepts of a Developed and a Developing World. The old dichotomy into the West and the Rest fails to catch the diversity and disparities of our contemporary world.  It is composed of one billion people in high- income countries at a loss about the future: more growth or more green, or both?  Another three billion in emerging economies are rapidly catching up by moving to better health and education, to cities and higher income. They live longer as they leave hunger and infections behind in exchange for injuries, cancer and mental ill health. Behind them are 2-3 billions in the rural areas of emerging economies and in the poorest countries, with trends varying from progress, through stagnation to free fall into the horrors of failed states.  Data indicates that the main problems lie in the two ends. The richest countries are per person a terrifying burden on the environment.  The poorest people respond to misery with giving birth to more than those who die, thus making the long-term  human footprint even larger.

We started Gapminder Foundation to provide a free, independent and easy to understand view of these dramatic global changes.  Free on the Internet and free to download and distribute in other ways to those living beyond the Internet. We rely on well documented international statistics that we through cutting edge animation techniques convert to understandable animations. 

The first promises are that the World Bank and other international organizations have accepted to make the data free.  The second promise is the new information technology enables a better design and free distribution. The first challenge is to maintain independence and a non-partial way describe the changing world. The second challenge is that numbers only show a part, though crucial and necessary, but not enough for understanding the world. Culture, rights and values can rarely be communicated as numbers.  So the promotion of a fact based world view based on numbers must be bold and humble at the same time.    

Let's try a little credo: I see philosophy and science as overlapping parts of a continuum. Many of the questions that I am interested in lie in the intersection. I tend to think in terms of probability distributions rather than dichotomous epistemic categories. I guess that in the far future the human condition will have changed profoundly (for better or worse). I think there is a non-trivial chance that this "far" future will be reached in this century, within the lifespan of some currently existing people. Regarding many big picture questions, I think there is a very real possibility that our views are very wrong. Improving the ways in which we reason, act, and prioritize under uncertainty would have wide relevance to many of our biggest challenges.

So my own research, and the work I'm doing as the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, is aimed at contributing insight into these matters and, ultimately, at raising the standards of rationality, wisdom, and moral reflection that humanity applies in choosing its own future.