Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Measures of Growth

This can be filed under "old news" for some of you, but for others it may be helpful information. Hans Rosling, who developed Gapminder, has a new presentation linking economic growth to health over 200 years. (HT to Mark Perry because his blog is where I ran into it first. Since then I've seen it many times, many blogs.) When you talk about measures of progress in the early part of your macro classes, you might want to offer this as a way of explaining how economic progress affects in social progress. It also offers an entre for discussion of coincidence, correlation and causation. Regardless of how or even if you use this presentation, imagine a not too distant future when you can do something like this in your classroom.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Great video, I like how it shows how economic progress affects the social progress. Put more videos up!:)

Alex Gaston said...

I really liked this presentation!! Does he have more videos? Also, this video makes me wonder, is is possible that in the future life expectancy can grow to AVERAGE more than 100 years of age? After 200 years, the average life expectancy of many countries doubled. Does this mean future technology and an advancement in the economy will lead to a life expectancy that hasn't been reached yet today?? Interesting to think about...

Tim Schilling said...

There are many more presentations and some videos (although I haven't seen any as innovative as this one) at Gapminder. The link is in the post.