2. Economic growth is a matter of life and death to the 1.8 million children who die of diarrhea each year globally.
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5. Wealth and Health go Together. Source: Penn World Tables and World Bank Group, World Development Indicators, 2005 Key Facts about the Wealth of Nations and Economic Growth
6. Fact Two: Everyone Used to be Poor Key Facts about the Wealth of Nations and Economic Growth
STIH has many great posts for this chapter, including two very important TED talks about economic growth (one by Alex Tabarrok).
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/92 hans About the video- From TED: Why you should listen to him: Even the most worldly and well-traveled among us will have their perspectives shifted by Hans Rosling. A professor of global health at Sweden's Karolinska Institute , his current work focuses on dispelling common myths about the so-called developing world , which (he points out) is no longer worlds away from the west. In fact, most of the third world is on the same trajectory toward health and prosperity, and many countries are moving twice as fast as the west did. What sets Rosling apart isn't just his apt observations of broad social and economic trends, but the stunning way he presents them. Guaranteed: You've never seen data presented like this. By any logic, a presentation that tracks global health and poverty trends should be, in a word: boring. But in Rosling's hands, data sings. Trends come to life. And the big picture — usually hazy at best — snaps into sharp focus. Rosling's presentations are grounded in solid statistics (often drawn from United Nations data), illustrated by the visualization software he developed. The animations transform development statistics into moving bubbles and flowing curves that make global trends clear, intuitive and even playful . During his legendary presentations, Rosling takes this one step farther, narrating the animations with a sportscaster's flair. Rosling developed the breakthrough software behind his visualizations through his nonprofit Gapminder , founded with his son and daughter-in-law. The free software — which can be loaded with any data — was purchased by Google in March 2007. (Rosling met the Google founders at TED.) Rosling began his wide-ranging career as a physician, spending many years in rural Africa tracking a rare paralytic disease (which he named konzo) and discovering its cause: hunger and badly processed cassava. He co-founded Médecins sans Frontièrs (Doctors without Borders) Sweden , wrote a textbook on global health, and as a professor at the Karolinska Institut in Stockholm initiated key international research collaborations. He's also personally argued with many heads of state, including Fidel Castro. As if all this weren't enough, the irrepressible Rosling is also an accomplished sword-swallower — a skill he demonstrated at TED2007.
See www.gapminder.com for a wealth of interactive (and animated) cross-country data.
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/525 About the talk, from TED: The "dismal science" truly shines in this optimistic talk, as economist Alex Tabarrok argues free trade and globalization are shaping our once-divided world into a community of idea-sharing more healthy, happy, and prosperous than anyone's predictions.
