Analysis of Hans Rosling's TED Talk 'Let My Dataset Change Your Mindset'

We live in a country where all children go to school to gain an education and 25% of them will go onto receive some type of college degree. Compare this to low-income countries, in which children are 16 times as likely to die prior to their fifth birthday (Nickitas, Middaugh & Aries, 2016). Beyond the lens of our smartphones, Facebook friends and Nike sneakers is a world full of desperate people wishing to have enough food to eat for today. Many parts of the world lack sanitation, safe housing, sparse medical care and no medication. The global health issue are everyone’s problems not only for the sake of altruism but, with the increase in global travel for routine business and pleasure, dangerous pathogen are no longer confine by boarders. The Ebola outbreak four years ago, proved the necessity of a global solution to global health issues. The collaborative practice of several world health agencies and economically developed countries along with the use of volunteers, statistical updates, the latest literature and practices kept this outbreak mostly contained to its region of origin and the death toll to approximately 11,000 people (mainly in West Africa) (WHO,

Over 20 percent of the global population live in unsustainable impoverished conditions, surviving on less than a dollar a day, with approximately 50 percent living on less than two dollars. Over 2 ½ billion people have a 10% infant mortality rate versus the 0.006% of infant deaths in developed countries. As conditions worsen the poor-rich gap widens through progressive decades, reaching an average per capita income of 74:1 in 1997.1 A debate has emerged as the whether developed countries possess a duty to ameliorate the living condition of the global poor and on what grounds said duty is justified.

It is clear that citizens in impoverished nations are stuck in a poverty trap, where they are unable to escape even with the assistance of aid from well developed nations. Many citizens are contributing money to charities because there is a moral obligation to donate if it does not put us into a state of economic instability. On the other hand, no matter how much aid is being given to nations stuck in poverty, this money is not helping any of the citizens. The money is going directly into the hands of corrupt governments and corporations, who constantly use it improperly. This aspect of money misuse is clearly illustrated in Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers. Boo focuses the book on the impoverished slum of Annawadi, located in Mumbai, India. Throughout the book, Boo shows examples of how the citizens of Annawadi are stuck in a poverty trap because of the country’s inconsistent and inefficient systems, leading to the failure of sustainable growth and poverty reduction to the nation. India is not the only place falling victim to this problem; many other third world countries grapple with the same issues. Other than helping the nations, aid has made impoverished nations circumstances even worse, pushing it into a further state of poverty. The main components of the failure of aid are due to developing countries not having proper infrastructure and institutions, no efficient government, and a dependence on aid.

The main point of Banerjee and Duflo’s Poor Economics (2012) is that aid is neither good nor bad: there are instances where it can help greatly and instances where it can fail those it seeks to help(4). Aid is a powerful tool, therefore it’s imperative that we carefully select the right types of projects (Banerjee & Duflo, 2012, p. 4-5). Banerjee and Duflo (2012) present a few key points of action as a framework for approaching aid, with the broadest issue being the idea that too much responsibility is placed on the poor in making the most basic decisions (268-69). One example that Banerjee and Duflo (2012) offer is the fact that many of the poorest people don’t have sanitary water

The world faced a stark reality at the turn of the century. Amidst unprecedented new wealth and powerful new technologies, millions were still getting sick and dying from diseases and life expectancies were actually falling. Therefore, in September 2000, 189 country representatives adopted the Millennium Development Goals to focus on time limited commitments to reduce poverty and promote human development in order to reduce child mortality, improve maternal health, combat HIV/AIDs, malaria and other disease by 2015.(WHO, 2008). The challenge for meeting this deadline of goals was perceived as emergent and had a powerful effect for transforming the long-standing problem of global public health. It was perceived that globalization was putting the social cohesiveness of many countries under stress and that the health systems as key constituents of our contemporary societies were clearly not performing as well as they could and should.

Although trips to third world countries are expensive, money for the plane ticket and other expenses are not the only factors that are affecting others in a positive way. The human interaction and personal level of care for those in need is a powerful manner to care and enhance the prosperity of others. People all over the world could use help from others, not just materialistically or economically. Human welfare should not just be measured by the materials they have or how much money they have.

An innocent child begs her mother for food, a single tear running down her cheek. The fires of life that once filled the girl’s eyes slowly begin to fade. The mother embraces her child, tells her the pain will be gone within a few moments. As she holds her, she feels the warmth slip away; her little girl’s body becomes engulfed by empty coldness. So much could have been done to save that life, from local government support to foreign aid, yet not enough aid was given. And so, society is posed with the question of “How much aid should wealthy nations provide for developing countries?” This paper will look at the philosophy behind this question by analyzing two articles.

In “Why do some people think they know what is good for others?” Naeem Inayatulla talks about many westernized country’s desire to give aid to these third world countries and how this can prove to be ineffective if done with the view that these impoverished countries need to be given what the western world thinks they need (Inayatulla, 2009: 345). This point is further emphasized in Brook’s novel when he describes how these “third world” countries seemed to fare the same, if not a bit better than their first world counterparts. This is especially true when one reads the section of the book with the interview of Xolelwa Azania, or Paul Redeker in the United States of Southern Africa. This interview talks about the origins of the Redeker Plan, which was a systematic way of intentionally sacrificing a large portion of a population in order to save another population in a more easily defensible or important location (Brooks, 2006: 106).

525.6 million live in poverty in Asia, 214 million in Sub-Saharan Africa, and 37 million in Latin America and the Caribbean.

This reflective essay is about a 2013 survey of Americans on the United States roles in global health. The survey article focuses on properties for U.S. in world affairs, priorities in global health, views of U.S. spending on foreign aid and effort to improve health in developing counties, caveats to support the current level of U.S. spending on global health, and the visibility of global health issues and sources of information. (Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, 2013) I feel like this survey is important to analyze because it shows to what degree the U.S. actually aides the other countries and the views of the American citizens.

At this moment in sub-Saharan Africa, every 3 seconds a child under five dies from AIDS and hunger, and more than 90 percent of the people are suffering long term malnourishment. (World Health Organization) In addition to this, measles are taking the life of a boy almost every minute, when a measles vaccine cost less than $1. (WHO, World Health Organization) "Things are moving in the wrong direction," says Marc Cohen (International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) Washington). "If we look at sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, all the projections are that poverty and hunger are going to get worse." There are 31.1 million food-deprived masses, scattered across the region surrounding Ethiopia, and elsewhere. (The Christian Science Monitor,

However, I always understood that in order for anything to change, the country itself had to be educated on what current societies look like in developed countries. Reading this chapter changed my views on undeveloped countries because I now see they are attempting to adapt their traditions to provide all individuals with fair treatment. Obviously, this will take time, help, and effort from both undeveloped and developed countries but I have a strong respect for the changed and struggles they have gone through to reach this point of understanding.

I am disturbed that not all lives are valued equally. I cannot accept the fact that children die from preventable diseases, simply because they are born in countries with less wealth and stability. In America, we are curing cancer with a mutated poliovirus strain, but we haven’t eradicated polio in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We come together in crises, highly publicized earthquakes and tsunamis, but we haven’t come together to solve the problem of basic human health, a right for every person on earth. Ensuring our health is complicated and daunting and requires the mass coordination of agencies and governments to build sustainable infrastructures with local citizens in charge. I want to be part of the solution and am engaging in public health in every way I can: in the field, in the classroom, and through global health

Unfortunately, it was estimated that roughly 1.2 billion people in 1993 lived in extreme or absolute poverty, that which Robert McNamara regards “‘a condition of life so characterized by malnutrition, illiteracy, disease, squalid surroundings, high infant mortality and low life expectancy as to be beneath any reasonable standard of human dignity’” (Singer 219, 220). These estimates can be projected at nearly 2 billion today. A large majority of the people living in absolute poverty resides in underdeveloped countries. Among the nearly 4.4 billion people in these countries, “3/5 lives in societies lacking basic sanitation; 1/3 go without safe drinking water; 1/4 lack adequate housing; 1/5 are undernourished, and 1.3 billion live on less than $1 a day” (Speth 1).

The Third World has experienced an exceptional change over the previous century. It has experienced the moderate movement from a customary society to the verge of modernization. Two of the most persuasive segments of this broad change are initiative and belief system. They have left a permanent imprint on the Third World and have characterized the bearing of this upheaval and its impact on whatever is left of the cutting edge world.