Hans Rosling Quotes
Data allow your political judgments to be based on fact, to the extent that numbers describe realities.
Rosling, Hans, Anna Rosling Rönnlund, and Ola Rosling. Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. Flatiron Books, 2018.
While the context applied to making business policy decisions, he also advocated it for politics and managing government. If policy makers or managers speculate and then act to fix possible and imaginable problem, they will waste time and resources dealing with eventualities that may never come to pass. A better strategy is to obtain data, analysize that, and fix the problems that we know will occur.
Despite strong efforts by the health authorities, many Americans went into an irrational panic mode regarding Ebola and States and local government were passing draconian quarantine measures that were actually counter-productive and increased the risk by pandering to public fears often instigated or whipped up by some media pundits.
This is an extract from a well-known standard for college professors.
Hans Rosling was a Swedish physician, academic, and public speaker. He was a professor of international health at Karolinska Institute and was the co-founder and chairman of the Gapminder Foundation, which developed the Trendalyzer software system. He held presentations around the world, including several TED Talks in which he promoted the use of data (and data visualization) to explore development issues. His posthumously published book Factfulness, coauthored with Anna Rosling Rönnlund and Ola Rosling, became an international bestseller.
