WS MoreOrLess: The Ignorance Test
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is the short edition of More or Less, first broadcast on the BBC World Service.
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Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. I'm Ruth Alexander. This week I find myself shifting uncomfortably in my chair, being quizzed by Hans Rosling, a professor of international public health who's perhaps best described as a kind of international development myth-buster. He started the Ignorance Project to investigate what people know and don't know about the world. He and his organisation, Gapminder, use surveys to ask representative groups of people simple questions about key aspects of global development. Most people do badly. So Hans asked me three questions from his ignorance test. See if you can do any better than I did.
The first one is about vaccines of children. The most important vaccine is the well-established measles vaccines, which is enormously important, especially for poor children that are malnourished, because for them, measles kill them. Now, what is the proportion of all one-year-olds in the world that have got the measles vaccine? Is it 2 out of 10, 5 out of 10, or 8 out of 10? In other words, is it a smaller part of the kids, is it half of the kids, or is it most of the kids?
I'd say it's five in every ten, 50%.
Half, you think? Okay. The next question is about the number of children in the world. So it's nearly not about children. It's about what young couples do in the bedroom. Okay.
What is the Ignorance Test and who created it?
When I was born, 1948, there were less than one billion children below 15 years of age in the world. Since then, it has more than doubled. And at the turn of the century, there were two billion children in the world.
In a short space of time.
Now, the best projections we have from the population specialists in the United Nations, they have estimated how many children there will be in the world by the end of this century. Do they say that the increase will continue so it will be 4 billion? Do they say the increase will be slower and there will be 3 billions? Or do they say, no, the number of children have stopped increasing. There will only be 2 billion at the end of this century.
I think there will be more, but it won't increase at the same rate. There'll be three billion at the end of the century.
Thank you. Last question is about money. Has the proportion of the world population that are desperately poor in extreme poverty during the last 20 years, has that doubled? Has the proportion remained the same or has it halved?
I think there are fewer now.
Thank you. So the last question, you were right. The proportion of people in extreme poverty has halved over the last 20 years.
How does Gapminder measure what people know about global development?
That's excellent.
And the number of children in the world, you were wrong. There's 2 billion children and it's not foreseen to be more children because they will indeed increase in Africa, but the number of children are decreasing in Europe and in Asia.
Even though the world's population is forecast to increase from 7 billion at the moment to 9 billion.
9 billion by mid-century, by end-century 11 billion. But that is because of the fill-up effect. We already now have 4 billion below age 30. If they grow up and they have one child each, each couple two children on average, then you will have... Four billions between 30 and 60 and four billions below. Then you have eight. And then you have the two older groups with two billions. That's 10 billions. That's where we will end up. Perhaps 11 if we add one billion for longer life. The breaking distance of a population growth is 70 years. Today, there is about 2.4 children per woman in the world. Now, I consider this one of the biggest events in the history of mankind that the number of children stopped increasing.
That has been completely missed by, not by you, by media, by all big mighty BBC has never told its listeners that the number of children have stopped increasing. And the first question about measles vaccination, you also got it wrong.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–1:53
2
What is the Ignorance Test and who created it?
1:53–3:17
3
How does Gapminder measure what people know about global development?
3:17–4:46
4
What proportion of one-year-olds worldwide have received the measles vaccine?
4:46–7:50
5
How many children will there be by the end of this century according to UN projections?
7:50–9:31