My friends were talking about the state of the world. At the same time, a book by Swedish professor Hans Rosling arrived at my house. He is the author of "Factfulness" and was a professor of health at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. He made a speciality of looking at data from the whole world and assessing how humanity was doing.
The current worries about climate change and other environmental problems were the focus of the 1972 book, "The Limits to Growth." That's the book that inspired my historian friend and me to create and teach a course called "Futures". It was a serious and semi-scientific look at trends and supplies and more or less predicted trouble for humans about the year 2025. During use of that book, I learned about ancient predictions of "disaster" and "the end of the world", often associated with military operations by and against one country or set of them or another.
Rosling was a good model of a data collector and analyzer. He enjoyed talking to college students and audiences of adults about what they knew and what they "knew" about the situations of life around the world. His data often contradicted general opinions about health and the quality of life. I didn't realize until I began writing this blog post that the 1972 book was followed up by "The Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Update."
Rosling died in 2017 but there are several of his videos on YouTube. Try searching Google for Hans Rosling videos or just go to his "200 countries, 200 years in 4 minutes". Rosling's son Ola and his daughter-in-law are carrying on his work.
