TOM EATON: A small lifeboat bobbing brightly on a sea of heaving despair
'We don‘t want to hear good news. And that‘s because good news doesn‘t make us angry. Bad news makes us angry. And anger feels so damned good'
YOU probably haven‘t heard of Hans Rosling. That‘s because he‘s trying to cheer you up.The retired Swedish professor calls himself an “edutainer”, a necessarily pandering label in our vigorously anti-intellectual age. If he introduced himself more accurately as someone who does interesting things with statistics about humanity, he — see, you‘ve glazed over already. So “edutainer” it is.Rosling‘s visual representations of our progress as a species are the sort of things that used to make TED talks quietly engrossing. When he speaks, people chuckle and raise their eyebrows. As promised on the bill, they are educated and entertained.But Rosling is more than a genteel diversion.These are hyperbolic times so I‘m hesitant to exaggerate too much, but, increasingly, Rosling looks like a lifeboat: small and dry (sometimes very dry, those wry Swedes), bobbing brightly on a sea of heaving despair. In graph after graph and tweet after tweet, Rosling‘s message is clear: most things are getting b...
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