My visit to the Swedish web-site was inspired by  the lecture on TED-conference by Hans Rosling. I do not claim that my findings are original, but what I have discovered surprised me and raised a lot of questions about our stereotyped vision of the modern world development. Evidently, we live in the era of globalization and it is not anymore a scary word. We know, it has much more positive influences and gives us an opportunity to solve many existing problems with holographic approach from different point of view.  Take, for example, global warming or communication technology development, spread of different religions or melting of pop musical cultures – we have so much in common now, than in difference. It is harder and harder now to brain-wash people, especially in the developed countries. Despite this fact, our old stereotypes are still alive and continue to co-exist with the new knowledge quite successfully. I can prove it with some statistics, I placed together on the "Gapminder"  charts. Lets begin our journey…

    1. We all confident that modern economy brings as a necessity participation of women in the labour market. It does not connect at all with the feminist movements as the latter were mostly about rights of women for voting and equal education etc.  It is wired in our poor brains, that  average family can not survive without woman’s labor and thus, as a matter of fact, it is supposed to be noticed in the world statistics of the last 2-3 decades, by some very important economical indicators as GDP total or personal income, for example. Lets see what the world (UN) statistics shows:
if you place two indicators, such as "woman labor force (%)" vs. "total income (GDP)" on this famous gapminder chart, and compare two countries Canada and India, you can see that actually, the tendency is opposite – the less women involved in the labour, the more productive the rest of the population is!? And the numbers are astonishing: in Canada – with 6% increase from 1980 to 2005 of women participation , increase in GDP is doubled, but in India 5 % decrease of women involvement in last two decades correlated with 4-folded increase in GDP!  Today, India with only 28% level of women participation has 7.7% growth income per year, when in Canada it is only 1.9% with 46% women in labour market. Now I have questions – how can it be possible? Coincidental correlation or an old stereotype – the more, the merrier? What could be the real issues there – technological outbreak in India; genders’ social roles are twisted (women, as well as men, are alienated from aspects of their human nature, which in turn, decrease their productivity);  women are significantly underpaid for their work,  difference in population demography (28% of population in India is equal 300 million,while 46% in Canada is 14 million).
   2. Now, new table, lets compare these two indicators: growth in income per person (%) and new cases of breast cancer per 100 000 women. In 2002 the growth income rate was the same for India and Canada, however, women in Canada have 84 vs 19 cases per each 100 000 ( I do not mention US with 101 cases). The situation looks even worse, if you place Health expenditure per capita vs cancer cases: 22 USD in India vs. 2244 USD in Canada per capita, which means two digits more to pay for 4 times better chance to die from cancer (obviously, here comes  8 times less effective health care system) !!! And these data similar for all kinds of cancer. HIV is an exception, but only for India and most of African and South American countries. Canada is ahead of most Western European countries, Japan, Korea, China, Pakistan and Indonesia. Now the turn for another question – where the myth coming from about better health of people in Canada, if the #1 death rate is caused by cancers and Canada and US are leading in it?! We can argue that such types of cancer as colon or rectum cancers, usually, prevailed in older, long living generations. And the chart "longevity vs.colon cancer cases" proves that this is the case almost for all western countries and Japan, however, long range of countries(China, Mediterranean, some middle eastern countries have comparably long life expectancy, but significantly better statistics about cancer cases (5-10 vs 50 per 100 000 men).
   3. Last for today pair of statistics indicators, which I entered just for fun,  is "academic achievements" vs. "patents granted". You expect that the more successful academically people in the country, the more technological outbreaks are there in place. However, there is actually, finally, some positive, bright outcome of being average: US with lower than average achievements in math, got a strong leadership in amount of granted patents, leaving far behind all competition, including Japan, South Korea with twice as better results in math. I was surprised that England was one of the leading countries as well, despite even lower marks that US:)  I advise to read the book of Daniel Pink "The whole New Mind" to explain these so-named "controversies". This is actually, the serious problem of the world educational systems, which produce billions of unhappy and unskilled for Life people, literally to leave them on their own at the very ambitious age.  By unskilled for Life, I mean absence of communicative, interactive, assertive/persuasive skills – sets not only for being successful, but also for overcoming failures, which are, on a contrary, very well delivered by schools of the North American continent, and Great Britain.

P.S. All the charts you can see on http://graphs.gapminder.org/world up until  I will figure out how to download them on my space.
…to be continued…