Jahan Rosling Synthesis

Original Jahan Rosling Response

Many consider that simply throwing money at struggling countries via computers and infrastructure will suddenly create a new first-world country, but that is simply not the case. Jahan and Rosling both deny the popular notion that there is an immediate need to economically support third world countries, but rather support the idea that the well-being of humans through health and education inspires societal growth. While they both believe human development improvements follow changes in society, Jahan takes a humanitarian approach and uses his podcast/speech to redefine human development itself and the ways it is measured and Rosling takes a more scientific approach that uses numerical data to demystify the “us vs. them” presumptions of the western world about the current state of non-Western countries and shows that health is a precursor to growth.

In Jahan’s podcast, he defines human development in such a way that just humans surviving and making money is not an endgoal of human development. Humans must be in a state of well-being in both mind and body in order to thrive. Values such as GDP should not be used as a standard to compare nations on human development, because it is narrow-minded and does not truly measure the human development. He first defined what exactly what human development was, which is the combination of having the capabilities of humans enhanced, such as better access to high quality health care and nutrition, and the opportunities for people to utilize their capabilties such as being able to innovate and be an entrepreneur. If humans have the ability to use their skills to their full potential, then they will be an effective and contributing member of society. However, these ideas cannot be measured based on how much money a country has. Human development is “of the people, for the people, and by the people” since the goal is to increase the overall well-being of humans, which is done by helping other humans, and this process is performed by other humans. What we are currently doing (providing resources, aid, and money) is certainly beneficial and helping people live better lives, but it is not developing humans on a grander scale. For example, innovation through entrepreneurship and the arts is not increased through these methods.

One roadblock in truly aiding the people who need help are our preconceptions about said people. They are not huge families with dozens of children, one dying after the other. Most people have normal family sizes and the same potential. Rosling cleared misconceptions that many westerners have about human development in non-western countries. Most westerners believe that there is a clear distinction between their countries and what they believe to be third world countries. In particular, they believed that the west had a focus on long life and small families while the third world countries had shorter lives with larger families.Rosling uses numerical data and analyzes that data through the changes in the social environment which he claims improved human development. While this may have been the case in the past such as the 1950’s, it is simply not the case anymore in most of the world. Countries such as Vietnam now have longer lives and smaller families. Rosling shows graphics demonstrating the wealth of countries as curves and in the 1970’s, there was a bimodal distribution with mostly Asian countries being in poverty. However, these countries are now out of poverty and as time passes, the distribution of income is to become a bell curve. Such growths were introduced by social change.

Where Jahan and Rosling differ is the direction of their ideologies. While both promote the idea that health is an essential component for any growth of human development, Rosling still slightly focuses on the economic side and Jahan decounces economics as the main focus and instead clarifies other aspects such as when he redefines work into more than just for monetary gains such as creative, care, and volunteer work. Rosling believes that the economic growth will occur after some point of time as a result of considering the health of the people. Despite this difference, Jahan and Rosling are both proponents of the idea that human development is about growing the ingrediants of human development. While monetary aid is helpful, teaching the members of the community and providing them opportunities to contribute to their own community is the key to any success in human development.