This presentation on global development is masterly, taken just as an exercise in the visual display of numerical data.

I qualified that because the bloke giving the lecture is a Swedish academic with all the déformations professionels thereof. Get ready to wince at passing references to the wonderful Cuban health-care system and the beneficent effects of Mao Tse-tung’s rule. Professor Rosling is way too credulous of Commie statistics. (Of the late-phase U.S.S.R., Malcolm Muggeridge commented that the only things they were able reliably to produce in any quantity were statistics.)

I lived in 1970s USA. That today’s Vietnam has a comparable standard of living, as Professor Rosling says, I very seriously doubt.

As an example of what can be done with modern data-presentation methods, though, the lecture is gripping. And Professor Rosling, those déformations aside, is an engaging lecturer. I especially liked the chimp jokes.

[The TED lectures, of which Professor Rosling’s is one, are worth exploring. I comment on another one of them over at Secular Right.]