If, instead of “democracy,” the data used the impartial world-wide measures of economic, civil, and political freedoms, the correlation between a nation’s level of human rights and its relative level of overall prosperity is consistently well above .9 for ALL of the 175 nations in the world which are not city-states, mini-states, or micro-states. REGARDLESS of whether a nation is land-locked or has access to the sea, REGARDLESS of its natural resources, REGARDLESS of its religion, language, or which continent it is on, the 175 largest of the 192 nations in the world have a level of prosperity (as measured by PPP of their GDP) which almost exactly correlates with their level of overall human rights.

For thirty-five years (since 1972), human rights have been a well-documented correlate to any nation’s prosperity. Repression is, using the same impartial data, a well-documented correlate to impoverishment. Stop using “democracy” as the gauge of human rights, and start using the accumulated actual numerical data of the world-wide measures of economic, civil and political freedoms as the more accurate measure of human rights. You’ll see a dramatic improvement in correlation on your graph, and just as importantly, your accuracy will be non-ideological.

I was really frustrated by this video of yours. I completely agree with you that human rights and democracy are important by themselves. But I am also convinced that free societies produces better health care and education than un-free societies. The fact that people can voice their criticism when the hospitals or schools don’t work, and elect politicians that are more competent, or has better ideas on how to spend the public money than the old ones, should logically at the end give positive results on the health and education of the citizens.

You are off course right that democracy is extremely difficult to meassure. But why don’t you try with the Freedom house index on civil liberties and political freedom of the world? Their index goes back to 1973, and it would be extremely interresting to see the correlation with education and health.

I tried my self the other night to get the stats right with the trendalizer gadget on google docs, but it was to difficult for me.

You will find the FH index here:

http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=439

http://www.freedomhouse.org/uploads/fiw09/CompHistData/FIW_AllScores_Countries.xls

Best regards

Erik

Translated by Google translate:
[...] • Democracy does not per se for prosperity. Sorry! We would like we could demonstrate a clear link between the blessings of democracy and prosperity. Democracy certainly makes for a better kind of society, but whether that is more prosperous? Hans Rosling has to acknowledge that there is no connection. He rightly concludes: democracy is a value in itself. Again a nice presentation of Gapminder. [...]

Dollar street is at least as valuable as the “generations visualization” of the Rosling ancestors.

Dollar street well there never were a flash-version. And from the looks of it, it wont be, at least not of the existing version of Dollar Street, it was built several years ago, in a time where web-development wasn’t that far advanced. It’s not out of the question though, that we will look into the possibilities to make a new version in the future, in that case obviously for all platforms. We understand it is a popular tool, in spite of it’s obvious technical limitations and we agree that the concept is really god.

/Staffan, Gapminder

It would be nice if I could download at gapminder.org…

I would also be interested in seeing some more of the World Health Docs’ community work featured at gapminder.org such as their lecture repository at Egypt’s Library at Alexandria.

Finally, Dollar Street. Alas, my lab doesn’t run Windows. What happened to the Flash version?