As a guy who looks at data for a living, I can tell you that people who say “look at the data” as if that proves everything are liars of the worst sort. Data is not a fact, it is a story; it is a metaphor. What data is being presented and how influences the story that is told. This is precisely my complaint about Rosling - he assures us that the data is unambiguous and tells a given (rosy) story, while in fact different data - or a different view of the same data - might tell a different story. (For example - does the definition of “extreme poverty” vary across the dataset?)
2 Likes
