Hace unos días leí en algunos diarios en Internet que Bill Gates gastó muchísimo dinero - u$s 72 millones, creo- en poner a disposición de todos los estudiantes norteamericanos un libro... gratis. Factfulness es el título del libro.
“Do you know why I’m obsessed with the numbers for the child mortality rate? It’s not only that I care about children. This measure takes the temperature of a whole society. Like a huge thermometer. Because children are very fragile. There are so many things that can kill them. When only 14 children die out of 1,000 in Malaysia, this means that the other 986 survive. Their parents and their society manage to protect them from all the dangers that could have killed them: germs, starvation, violence, and so on. So this number 14 tells us that most families in Malaysia have enough food, their sewage systems don’t leak into their drinking water, they have good access to primary health care, and mothers can read and write. It doesn’t just tell us about the health of children. It measures the quality of the whole society.
“It’s not the numbers that are interesting. It’s what they tell us about the lives behind the numbers,” I continued. “Look how different these numbers are: 14, 35, 55, and 171. Life in these countries must be extremely different.”
“I picked up the pen. “Tell me now how life was in Saudi Arabia 35 years ago? How many children died in 1960? Look in the second column.”
“TWO HUNDRED … and forty two.”
The volume dropped as my students articulated the big number: 242.
“Yes. That’s correct. Saudi Arabian society has made amazing progress, hasn’t it? Child deaths per thousand dropped from 242 to 35 in just 33 years. That’s way faster than Sweden. We took 77 years to achieve the same improvement.”
La idea del autor es brindarnos herramientas para pensar, analizar y entender mejor el mundo. Para ser objetivos, para que basemos nuestro conocimientos en datos y no chismes ni en engaños creados por la forma en que funciona nuestro cerebro.
Gates no se equivocó. Leanlo. Es muy recomendable...
Fragmento de Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. El autor es Hans Rosling.
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