Crossing the river of myths
A few minutes before a recent lecture at Paine Hall, global health statistician Hans Rosling stood onstage, head down, and ran through his PowerPoint images. One showed the bespectacled Swede chest-deep in water. The caption read: “Help us across the river of myths.” To Rosling, a physician and co-founder of the Gapminder Foundation, busting myths is a full-time job. It often keeps him on the road despite his professorship in international health at the Karolinska Institutet near Stockholm. One myth he often takes aim at is the misperception that the world is divided in two, with struggling, developing nations in one camp and wealthy industrial nations in another. The truth is, Rosling said, that the world is a complicated quilt of nations. We may miss how some of them achieve little-seen advances in income, infant mortality, literacy, and other measures of success. To help uncover — and illustrate — the complexities, and...