The seemingly impossible is possible

"We can have a good world"

This may sound a bit of a utopian idea... but backed up with statistics it can be possible.

I'm not very good at maths, but I love maths in school. When it comes to statistics, I have come to dislike seeing a bunch of overwhelmingly huge numbers [##1483508526##] or data presented in boring graphs and tables. While researching about poverty, I stumbled across a video on youtube called 'the joy of stats' presented by, as BBC news described him: "superstar boffin Professor Hans Rosling, whose eye-opening, mind-expanding and funny online lectures have made him an international internet legend". But even with that description my initial thought is that joy and stats just doesn't work... in my opinion they don't have 'positive correlation'. But despite my cynicism... watching a couple of Rosling's lectures in TEDtalks, there is a sense of joy as statistics shed some light in that the seemingly impossible task of eradicating poverty as one of the UN millennium goals is possible.

One comment on this video says "The most fascinating about all of this is that his affirmations, conclusions and hopes about the future of poverty around the world are based on data, not on some abstract speculative historical theory."

Rosling demonstrated the Dollar Street, comparing households of varying income levels worldwide. And he goes on to explain that in poverty everything is about survival -about having food. To get out of poverty there's a need for technology, BUT there's a need for markets to get away from poverty.

What I like about Hans's talk is that he explained the many dimensions of development (human rights, environment, governance, economic growth, education, health, culture -which are all important), differentiating the goals from the means. He argues that economic growth is the most important means for development but is NOT the goal. "Money is not the goal, Human Rights is". He adds that Human Rights is not that strong of a means for achieving development, but it is the highest goal along with culture, which "brings joy to life and value of living".