[Magdalen] Speaking of Stats [was Yet another case of race abuse?

[Jim Guthrie]

>As a nation we have to come to terms with the use of statistics.

Nicolas Kristoff nailed some positive stats yesterday:

"We journalists are a bit like vultures, feasting on war, scandal and disaster. 
Turn on the news, and you see Syrian refugees, Volkswagen corruption, 
dysfunctional government.

Yet that reflects a selection bias in how we report the news: We cover planes 
that crash, not planes that take off. Indeed, maybe the most important thing 
happening in the world today is something that we almost never cover: a stunning 
decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease.

Huh? You’re wondering what I’ve been smoking! Everybody knows about the spread 
of war, the rise of AIDS and other diseases, the hopeless intractability of 
poverty.

One survey found that two-thirds of Americans believed that the proportion of 
the world population living in extreme poverty has almost doubled over the last 
20 years. Another 29 percent believed that the proportion had remained roughly 
the same.

That’s 95 percent of Americans — who are utterly wrong. In fact, the proportion 
of the world’s population living in extreme poverty hasn’t doubled or remained 
the same. It has fallen by more than half, from 35 percent in 1993 to 14 percent 
in 2011 (the most recent year for which figures are available from the World 
Bank).

When 95 percent of Americans are completely unaware of a transformation of this 
magnitude, that reflects a flaw in how we journalists cover the world — and I 
count myself among the guilty. Consider:

• The number of extremely poor people (defined as those earning less than $1 or 
$1.25 a day, depending on who’s counting) rose inexorably until the middle of 
the 20th century, then roughly stabilized for a few decades. Since the 1990s, 
the number of poor has plummeted.

• In 1990, more than 12 million children died before the age of 5; this toll has 
since dropped by more than half.

• More kids than ever are becoming educated, especially girls. In the 1980s, 
only half of girls in developing countries completed elementary school; now, 80 
percent do.

The most important thing going on in the world today is something we almost 
never cover: a rapid decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease.

Granted, some 16,000 children still die unnecessarily each day. It’s maddening 
in my travels to watch children dying simply because they were born in the wrong 
place at the wrong time.

But one reason for our current complacency is a feeling that poverty is 
inevitable — and that’s unwarranted.

The world’s best-kept secret is that we live at a historic inflection point when 
extreme poverty is retreating. United Nations members have just adopted 17 new 
Global Goals, of which the centerpiece is the elimination of extreme poverty by 
2030. Their goals are historic. There will still be poor people, of course, but 
very few who are too poor to eat or to send children to school. Young 
journalists or aid workers starting out today will in their careers see very 
little of the leprosy, illiteracy, elephantiasis and river blindness that I have 
seen routinely.

“We live at a time of the greatest development progress among the global poor in 
the history of the world,” notes Steven Radelet, a development economist and 
Georgetown University professor, in a terrific book coming in November, “The 
Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World.”

“The next two decades can be even better and can become the greatest era of 
progress for the world’s poor in human history,” Radelet writes.

I write often about inequality, a huge challenge in the U.S. But globally, 
inequality is diminishing, because of the rise of poor countries.

What does all this mean in human terms? I was thinking of that last week while 
interviewing Malala Yousafzai, the teenage Nobel Peace Prize winner. Malala’s 
mother grew up illiterate, like the women before her, and was raised to be 
invisible to outsiders. Malala is a complete contrast: educated, saucy, 
outspoken and perhaps the most visible teenage girl in the world.

Even in countries like Pakistan, the epoch of illiterate and invisible women 
like Malala’s mother is fading; the epoch of Malala is dawning. The challenge 
now is to ensure that rich donor nations are generous in supporting the Global 
Goals — but also that developing countries do their part, rather than succumbing 
to corruption and inefficiency. (I’m talking to you, Angola!)

There’s one last false argument to puncture. Cynics argue that saving lives is 
pointless, because the result is overpopulation that leads more to starve. Not 
true. Part of this wave of progress is a stunning drop in birthrates.

Haitian women now average 3.1 children; in 1985, they had six. In Bangladesh, 
women now average 2.2 children. Indonesians, 2.3. When the poor know that their 
children will survive, when they educate their daughters, when they access 
family planning, they have fewer children.

So let’s get down to work and, on our watch, defeat extreme poverty worldwide. 
We know that the challenges are surmountable — because we’ve already turned the 
tide of history.


http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/01/opinion/nicholas-kristof-the-most-important-thing-and-its-almost-a-secret.html?_r=0

Cheers,
Jim Guthrie