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I'm going to ask you
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three multiple choice questions.
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Use this device. Use this device to answer.
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The first question is, how did the number
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of deaths per year
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from natural disaster,
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how did that change during the last century?
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Did it more than double,
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did it remain about the same in the world as a whole,
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or did it decrease to less than half?
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Please answer A, B or C.
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I see lots of answers. This is much
faster than I do it at universities.
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They are so slow. They keep
thinking, thinking, thinking.
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Oh, very, very good.
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And we go to the next question.
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so how long did women 30 years old
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in the world go to school:
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seven years, five years or three years?
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A, B or C? Please answer.
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Hmmmm.
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Very good, very good.
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I have many answers coming in.
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Thank you very much. Thank you very much.
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We stop it, we go here,
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and we go to the next question.
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In the last 20 years, how did the percentage
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of people in the world
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who live in extreme poverty change?
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Extreme poverty — not having enough food for the day.
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Did it almost double,
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did it remain more or less the same,
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or did it halve?
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A, B or C?
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There we are.
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Thank you very much.
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Now, answers.
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You see,
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deaths from natural disasters in the world,
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you can see it from this graph here,
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from 1900 to 2000.
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In 1900, there was about half a million people
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who died every year from natural disasters:
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floods, earthquakes, volcanic
eruption, whatever, droughts.
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And then, how did that change?
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Gapminder asked the public in Sweden.
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This is how they answered.
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The Swedish public answered like this:
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50 percent thought it had doubled,
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38 percent said it's more or less the same,
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12 said it had halved.
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This is the best data from the disaster researchers,
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and it goes up and down,
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and it goes to the Second World War,
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and after that it starts to fall and it keeps falling
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and it's down to much less than half.
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The world has been much, much more capable
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as the decades go by
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to protect people from this, you know.
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So only 12 percent of the Swedes know this.
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So I went to the zoo and I asked the chimps.
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(Laughter) (Applause)
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The chimps don't watch the evening news,
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so the chimps,
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they choose by random, so the
Swedes answer worse than random.
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Now how did you do?
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That's you.
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You were beaten by the chimps.
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(Laughter)
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But it was close.
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You were three times better than the Swedes,
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but that's not enough.
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You shouldn't compare yourself to Swedes.
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You must have higher ambitions in the world.
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So why is it like this?
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It must be that
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people have preconceived ideas of some sort.
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Let's look at the next answer here: women in school.
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Here, you can see men went eight years.
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How long did women go to school?
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Well, we asked the Swedes like this,
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and that gives you a hint, doesn't it.
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The right answer is probably the one
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the fewest Swedes picked, isn't it?
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(Laughter)
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Let's see, let's see. Here we come.
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Yes, yes, yes, women have almost caught up.
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This is the U.S. public. This is the U.S. public.
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And this is you. Here you come.
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Ooh.
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Well, congratulations, you're
twice as good as the Swedes,
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but you don't need me —
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So how come? I think it's like this,
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that everyone is aware that there are countries
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and there are areas
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where girls have great difficulties.
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They are stopped when they go to school,
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and it's disgusting.
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But in the majority of the world,
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where most people in the world live,
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most countries, girls today go to school
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as long as boys, more or less.
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That doesn't mean that gender equity is achieved,
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not at all.
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They still are confined to terrible, terrible limitations,
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but schooling is there in the world today.
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Now, we miss the majority.
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When you answer, you answer
according to the worst places,
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and there you are right, but you miss the majority.
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What about poverty?
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Well, it's very clear that poverty here
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was almost halved,
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and in U.S., when we asked the public,
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only five percent got it right.
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And you?
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Ah, you almost made it to the chimps.
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(Laughter) (Applause)
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That little, just a few of you!
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There must be preconceived ideas, you know.
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And many in the rich countries,
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they think that oh, we can never end extreme poverty.
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It's just those people with big hearts
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and work as humanitarians who think so.
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Of course they think so,
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because they don't even know what has happened.
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The first thing to think about the future
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is to know about the present.
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These questions were a few of the first ones
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in the pilot phase of the Ignorance Project
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in Gapminder Foundation that we run,
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and it was started, this project, last year
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by my boss, and also my son, Ola Rosling. (Laughter)
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He's cofounder and director,
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and he wanted, Ola told me
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we have to be more systematic
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when we fight devastating ignorance.
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So already the pilots reveal this,
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that so many in the public score worse than random,
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so we have to think about preconceived ideas,
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and one of the main preconceived ideas
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is about world income distribution.
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Look here. This is how it was in 1975.
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It's the number of people on each income,
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from one dollar a day, one dollar a day —
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(Applause)
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See, there was one hump here,
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around one dollar a day,
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and then there was one hump here
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somewhere between 10 and 100 dollars.
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The world was two groups.
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It was a camel world, like a camel with two humps,
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the poor ones and the rich ones,
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and there were fewer in between.
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But look how this has changed:
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As I go forward, what has changed,
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the world population has grown,
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and the humps start to merge.
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The lower humps merged with the upper hump,
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and the camel dies and we have a dromedary world
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with one hump only.
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But look at the difference.
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When you answer the questions,
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many think that it's still about how it is
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here in the poll.
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The percent in poverty has decreased.
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Still it's appalling
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that so many remain in extreme poverty.
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We still have this group, almost a billion, over there,
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but that can be ended now.
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The challenge we have now
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is to get away from that,
understand where the majority is,
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and that is very clearly shown in this question.
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We asked, what is the percentage of the world's
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one-year-old children who have got those
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basic vaccines against measles and other things
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that we have had for many years:
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20, 50 or 80 percent?
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Now, this is what the U.S.
public and the Swedish answered.
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Look at the Swedish result:
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you know what the right answer is.
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(Laughter)
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Who the heck is a professor of
global health in that country?
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Well, it's me. It's me.
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(Laughter)
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It's very difficult, this. It's very difficult.
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(Applause)
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However, Ola's approach
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to really measure what we know made headlines,
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and CNN published these results on their web
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and they had the questions there, millions answered,
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and I think there were about 2,000 comments,
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and this was one of the comments.
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These were the survey companies
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who did these surveys together with us,
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and the comment we had there,
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one was very interesting. It was Bill Smith.
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"I bet no member of the media
passed the test," he said.
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So Ola told me, "Take these devices.
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You are invited to media conferences.
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Give it to them and measure what the media know."
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And ladies and gentlemen,
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for the first time, the informal results
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from a conference with U.S. media.
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And then, lately, from the European Union media.
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(Laughter)
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You see, the problem is not that people
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don't read and listen to the media.
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The problem is that the
media doesn't know themselves.
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What shall we do about this, Ola?
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Do we have any ideas?
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(Applause)
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Ola Rosling: Yes, I have an idea, but first,
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I'm so sorry that you were beaten by the chimps.
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Fortunately, I will be able to comfort you
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by showing why it was not your fault, actually.
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Then, I will equip you with some tricks
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for beating the chimps in the future.
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That's basically what I will do.
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But first, let's look at why are we so ignorant,
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and it all starts in this place.
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It's Hudiksvall. It's a city in northern Sweden.
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It's a neighborhood where I grew up,
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and it's a neighborhood with a large problem.
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Actually, it has exactly the same problem
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which existed in all the neighborhoods
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where you grew up as well.
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It was not representative. Okay?
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It gave me a very biased view
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of how life is on this planet.
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So this is the first piece of the ignorance puzzle.
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We have a personal bias.
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We have all different experiences
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from communities and people we meet,
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and on top of this, we start school,
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and we add the next problem.
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Well, I like schools,
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but teachers tend to teach outdated worldviews,
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because they learned something
when they went to school,
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and now they describe this world to the students
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without any bad intentions,
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and those books, of course, that are printed
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are outdated in a world that changes.
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And there is really no practice
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to keep the teaching material up to date.
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So that's what we are focusing on at Google.
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So we have these outdated facts
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added on top of our personal bias.
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What happens next is news, okay?
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An excellent journalist knows how to pick
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the story that will make headlines,
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and people will read it because it's sensational.
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It's unusual events are more interesting, no?
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And they are exaggerated,
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and especially things we're afraid of.
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A shark attack on a Swedish person
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will get headlines for weeks in Sweden.
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Okay. So these three skewed sources of information
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was really hard to get away from, wasn't it, you know?
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They kind of bombard us
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and equip our mind with a lot of strange ideas,
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and on top of it, we put the very thing
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that makes us human, our human intuition. Okay?
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It was good in evolution.
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It helped us generalize
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and jump to conclusions very, very fast.
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It helped us exaggerate what we were afraid of,
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and we seek causality where there is none,
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and we then get an illusion of confidence
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where we believe that we are the best car drivers,
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above the the average.
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Everybody answered that question,
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"Yeah, I drive cars better."
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Okay, this was good evolutionarily,
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but now when it comes to the worldview,
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it is the exact reason why it's upside down.
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The trends that are increasing are instead falling,
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and the other way around,
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and in this case, the chimps
use our intuition against us,
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and it becomes our weakness instead of our strength.
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It was supposed to be our strength, wasn't it.
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Okay. Well, we're going to try to solve it.
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So how do we solve such problems?
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First, we need to measure it,
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and then we need to cure it.
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So by measuring it we can understand
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what is the pattern of ignorance.
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We started the pilot last year,
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and now we're pretty sure that we will encounter
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a lot of ignorance across the whole world,
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and the idea is really to
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scale it up to all domains
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or dimensions of global development,
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such as climate, endangered species, human rights,
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gender equality, energy, climate, finance.
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All different sectors have facts,
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and there are organizations trying to spread
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awareness about these facts.
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So I've started actually contacting some of them,
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like WWF and Amnesty International and UNICEF,
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and asking them, what are your favorite facts
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which you think the public don't know?
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Okay, I gather those facts.
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Imagine a long list with, say, 250 facts.
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And then we poll the public
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and see where they score worst.
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Okay? So we get a shorter list
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with the terrible results,
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like some few examples Hans,
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and we have no problem finding these kinds
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of terrible results.
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Okay, this little shortlist, what
are we going to do with it?
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Well, we turn it into a knowledge certificate,
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a global knowledge certificate,
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which you can use, if you're a large organization,
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a school, a university, or maybe a news agency,
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to certify yourself as globally knowledgable.
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Okay? Basically meaning, we don't hire people
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who score like chimpanzees, you know?
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Of course you shouldn't.
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So maybe 10 years from now,
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if this project succeeds,
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you will be sitting at an interview
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having to fill out this crazy global knowledge.
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So now we come to the practical tricks.
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How are you going to succeed?
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There is, of course, one way,
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which is to sit down late nights
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and learn all the facts by heart
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by reading all these reports.
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That will never happen, actually.
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Not even Hans thinks that's going to happen.
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People don't have that time.
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People like shortcuts, and here are the shortcuts.
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We need to turn our intuition into strength again.
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We need to be able to generalize.
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So now I'm going to show you some tricks
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where the misconceptions are turned around
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into rules of thumb.
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Let's start with the first misconception.
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This is very widespread.
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Everything is getting worse.
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You heard it. You thought it yourself. Okay?
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The other way to think is, most things improve.
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Okay? So you're sitting with a question in front of you
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and you're unsure. You should guess "improve."
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Okay? Don't go for the worse.
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That will help you score better on our tests, okay?
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(Applause)
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That was the first one.
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Okay, there are rich and poor
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and the gap is increasing.
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It's a terrible inequality.
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Yeah, it's an unequal world,
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but when you look at the data, it's one hump.
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Okay? If you feel unsure,
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go for the "most people are in the middle." Okay?
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That's going to help you get the answer right.
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Now, the next preconceived idea is
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first countries and people need to be very, very rich
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to get the social development
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like girls in school and be ready for natural disasters.
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No, no, no. That's wrong.
-
Look: that huge hump in the middle
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already have girls in school.
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So if you are unsure, go for the
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"the majority already have this,"
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like electricity and girls in
school, these kinds of things.
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They're only rules of thumb,
-
so of course they don't apply to everything,
-
but this is how you can generalize.
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Let's look at the last one.
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If something, yes, this is a good one,
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sharks are dangerous. Okay.
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No, well, yes, but they are not so important
-
in the global statistics, that is what I'm saying.
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I actually, I'm very afraid of sharks.
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So as soon as I see a question
about things I'm afraid of,
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which might be earthquakes, other religions,
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maybe I'm afraid of terrorists or sharks,
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anything that makes me feel,
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assume you're going to exaggerate the problem.
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Okay? That's a rule of thumb.
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Of course there are dangerous things
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that are also great.
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Sharks kill very, very few.
That's how you should think.
-
With these four rules of thumb,
-
you could probably answer better than the chimps,
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because the chimps cannot do this.
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They cannot generalize these kinds of rules.
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And hopefully we can turn your world around
-
and we're going to beat the chimps. Okay?
-
(Applause)
-
That's a systematic approach.
-
Now the question, is this important? Okay.
-
Yes, it's important to understand poverty,
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extreme poverty and how to fight it,
-
and how to bring girls in school.
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When we realize that actually it's
succeeding, we can understand it.
-
But is it important for everyone else
-
who cares about the rich end of this scale?
-
I would say yes, extremely important,
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for the same reason.
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If you have a fact worldview of today,
-
you might have a chance to understand
-
what's coming next in the future.
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We're going back to these two humps in 1975.
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That's when I was born,
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and I selected the West.
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That's the current EU countries and North America.
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Let's now see how the rest and the West compares
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in terms of how rich you are.
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These are the people who can afford
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to fly abroad with an airplane for vacation.
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In 1975, only 30 percent of them lived
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outside EU and North America.
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But this has changed, okay?
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So first, let's look at the change up until today, 2014.