Hans Rosling doesn’t consider himself an optimist or pessimist but ‘possibilist’
My problem with Rosling is that he furthers one of the problems with our modern discourse; the assumption that a given dataset inevitably leads to one conclusion. It's not true. I wish it were but it isn't.The same statistics about mass incarceration of African American males in the US that leads me to conclude that we have an issue of systemic racism leads far right people to conclude that African American males have an inherent tendency toward criminality. I would call that a gross misrepresentation of the data, but it is what happens.Rosling, in my mind, is guilty of misrepresenting some data, and I'm sure in his mind my conclusions based on the same data are equally ill informed.But Rosling tends, for me, not to make convincing arguments. He tends to throw up some graphs and say "Look! It's obvious we should do what I say!!"