One of the powerful things Hans Rosling did in his life was to get people to take their focus off the daily…

One of the powerful things Hans Rosling did in his life was to get people to take their focus off the daily team sports of politics, and back onto reality. Rosling could show how so much was actually going much more right than we believe when listening to the team sports. /1 https://t.co/JHX2TyYpjk

There are two ways societies actually progress, and neither has any connection with what we call politics. One is catastrophe, like natural disasters (including pandemics) and wars. Catastrophes upend existing social relations, they’re societies’ on/off switch. The reboot. /2

They have the power to overcome entrenched social status. Debate never does. It’s a terrible mechanism, lots of people are maimed and die through these catastrophes. But after they clear the decks, actual change often does occur. Like we saw from the mid-20th century. /3

After a world war, a pandemic, and then another world war. It gave society a good kicking, and huge social progress followed, as entrenched interests were pushed to one side for long enough to allow genuine change. The actual idea of ‘the public’ took off at this point. /4

Have Tweeted lots about how from the 1970s onwards, the old elites that had been pushed aside earlier in the century began to reassert themselves. An all-out assault on everything ‘public’. Today that assault is called ‘the economy’. Markets, nothing but individuals. /5

Have also Tweeted about the second way progress happens. When enough knowledge is embedded in a society, through engineering, science and other knowledge, that the society can only function when that knowledge is maintained. No amount of debate or opinion can do it. /6

I think a lot of what Rosling mapped in his presentations was this. The push for improvement driven by established expertise and knowledge embedded in institutions, which no team sports could really touch without breaking important things they were reliant upon as well. /7

I don’t want catastrophe to fix our current problems, I’d much prefer the incredible socio-technical complexity of everyday life now to do that. But I do know ‘politics’ won’t, which is why I doze off with all the daily team sports. /end