rePost::Why the Statistics Point Toward Progress – BusinessWeek

You seem quite optimistic. Why, especially since you have studied such troubling phenomena as hunger in struggling nations?

Maybe because I am living my second life. When I was 30 years old, I had testicular cancer, and I said farewell to my first life. But a full dose of radiation saved me. I’m now 61, and I’ve lived most of my life after my cancer. I celebrate that.
My father was a coffee roaster, and I was the first in my family to go to school for more than six years. I studied public health in Bangalore in 1972, and I saw huge poverty but also very good students and flourishing industry. I’ve worked in Africa and started university collaborations with the Middle East and Latin America. I’ve done field surveys in Cuba, where I spent a full night quarrelling with Fidel Castro on study design. So I have been able to experience many leaps and dead ends of human progress.
Now I look at the data and take a fact-based approach. It’s not that I’m an optimist; it’s that I know that child mortality in Egypt has fallen to 4%. When you are knowledgeable about the actual progress of the world, you become labeled as an optimist. But I am deeply concerned by the poverty of the bottom billion.
via Why the Statistics Point Toward Progress – BusinessWeek.