THE NOUVEAU NIHILISTS or A RESPONSE TO “WHY YOU SHOULDN’T LISTEN TO SELF-SERVING OPTIMISTS…”

Someone shared with me an article by a senior lecturer in sociology from Lund University, Roland Paulsen. Therein Paulsen offers a take-down of who he calls the "New Optimists", characters like Hans Rosling, Steven Pinker, and Bill Gates. It was interesting but also profoundly depressing. In fact, if I was teaching a class in media literacy this would be the first reading. Why? Because I’ve never read anything more ideologically possessed (read: pathologically walled-off from reality) and trusting that readers have not and will not engage with the work being critiqued.

Paulsen argues that such optimistic types, Rosling et al, are wildly manipulating their data (as these overly quantified folks are wont to do) while passionately disregarding the world’s inequality (as only possible from their impossibly privileged vantage) – and all this just so they can engage in their ‘glass half-full’ form of ‘neoliberal self-congratulation’ (and perhaps sell a few books on the side.) Well, could Paulsen offer something more delicious to his audience?

But we might ask what Paulsen’s primary target, Hans Rosling, was up to. And I happen to have read his book and followed his life’s work. Rosling’s whole gag was getting people who think they’re super-brainy, perfectly rational, are all about scientific reasoning, and particularly focussed on the numbers to take a quiz. That quiz offered questions asking what percentage of Swedes are over the age of 65 or the number of girls going to school in developing countries. (Pretty solid numbers that no one ever disputes.) Rosling then demonstrates to these ‘just the facts’ types are the ones often most wrong and most prone to blinding bias; that the Noble laureates and medical researchers and investment bankers score worst on his simple little quiz about, of all things, percentages and ratios – and just those figures we can all agree to be true. In his book, Factfulness, that Paulsen pretends to critique, Rosling starts on this point and has a whole chapter entitled “The Single Perspective Instinct” all about it. And this is exactly why Bill Gates was a fan of Rosling; not because Rosling confirmed Gates’ insane worldview – he didn’t – but because Rosling convincingly proved Gates’ assumptions and worldview and language use was all totally backward and outdated by not less than half a century.

Paulsen’s take on Rosling is nearly identical to what I frame in my thesis as ‘the Descartes myth.’ (This is why Descartes and Rosling, though seemingly peripheral, are actually central. Narratives such as these yield a misreading of climate change, hunger, extreme poverty, inequality, and on; and, as a result, can provide real solutions only by accident.)

Paulsen says, for example, “it is baffling that Rosling presents his bubble chart as a map of ‘world health,’ given that it is actually a map of income and life expectancy. Not even life expectancy can be counted as a good measure of health, given that one’s life may be spent in poor health.” But this is everything Rosling was talking about (when he was still alive) and exactly what his book was about. Rosling was not merely a statistician (though this is clearly why he raises so much anger from flat-Earthers, anti-vaxers, and climate deniers like Paulsen), he was also a celebrated doctor who advised the WHO and UNICEF, co-founded Doctors Without Borders Sweden, was a physician in India and Africa, a professor of International Health who co-authored textbooks on Global Health, etc… Then, saying Hans Rosling, of all people, didn’t understand the difference between age and sickness or the difference between living with psychosis and not being so impaired is beyond stupid. Is it not? (What the heck is Paulsen on about? And how is this not an Onion article?) This is like claiming Bill Gates knows nothing about Microsoft or Windows or the fucking Dalai Lama doesn’t know anything about Tibet or Buddhism… It suggests Paulsen didn’t read the book he claims to be critiquing. I’d like to ask Paulsen if Rosling’s numbers on the correlation between income and CO2 are also “misleading” “facts” based on bad evidence and bad reasoning and bad methods or if he’s just happily cherry-picking the data.

Rosling was never, for a minute, focused on the numbers. His whole book (the one explicitly not being critiqued by Paulsen) is about why you can’t only look at the numbers and why you need to be focussed on real human lives and the bigger social and cultural picture. Rosling says this over and over throughout. But he also understood that child mortality numbers, say, speak volumes about what is going on across all of society. They tell us a little bit about violence, nutrition, disease, maternal well-being – and, like it or not, does give us some vague gauge of the quality of that society. (“Quality of that society” = whether anyone at all would be quicker or slower to move their entire family to said county or country if they care at all about them...) And when you add that vague, bad bit of data to other information you can actually get a reasonable (“reasonable” to anyone) picture of how the world actually is.

“Life expectancy” is about water treatment and substance abuse and hospital provisions and public transit and dollars spent on contraception. Rosling wasn’t an economist working for the WTO or IMF, obsessed with GDP and making the already-wealthy only wealthier still; no, he was concerned about all the social determinants of health (education, access to clean drinking water, sense of community, not having crippling schizophrenia or lead poisoning…) and how to actually improve people’s lives. This was what this man did with his life. And there’s a 45-year-long paper-trail of him saving lives and making every attempt to improve the world in a substantive manner. He wasn’t a numbers guy from an ultraconservative think tank who made a graph and gave a TEDtalk about it, as is the framing in Paulesn's (frankly insane) work.

Relentless, Paulsen writes “Ironically, Rosling’s bubbles also use per-capita averages, for both income and life expectancy, in a way that Rosling himself criticises in Factfulness. In his words, ‘Averages mislead by hiding a spread (a range of different numbers) in a single number.’” So is it more likely that:

A) Hans Rosling (doctor, advisor to the world on health, and statistician) wrote in his book that “averages mislead” and then turned around and tried to bamboozle folks with averages (between chapters about all the ways in which averages can mislead) or

B) that Paulsen, someone with questionable motives and virtually no evidence of good intentions, is knowingly misrepresenting someone and trying to make a career out of it (publishing many articles in multiple languages with Rosling’s name in the title – but only after his target has died)?

In the graph Paulsen is so concerned about, Rosling’s data shows that GDP and life expectancy are not strongly correlated. It doesn’t show the opposite – as told by those with a crazed ideological bent who insists Rosling is making an argument for more third world sweatshops and bigger IMF loans. The graph Paulsen cites shows that Qatar (the highest GDP on earth) and Nicaragua (one of the lowest) have the same life expectancy! And this goes for the US and Ecuador; UAE and El Salvador; South Africa and Congo… Further, countries with the exact same GDP can have dramatically different life expectancy. It also shows clearly that the world is not so polarized into rich/poor, developed/undeveloped, north/south, east/west in the manner many fanatics like to claim. These are 1950s ideas. And they’re been wrong my whole lifetime. What Paulsen ignores, too, is that the bubble graph starts at a life expectancy of 50, not 35 or 25 or 0. He declines to argue the numbers are wrong but suggests that, well, not all Americans have the same income and life expectancy (as if that’s an insight and not also Rosling’s exact claim) and that some Swedes, who are 75 or 80 and have access to clean drinking water and highly desirable surrounds, also live with bipolar disorder or hemophilia. Wow, that’s quite the critique!

Paulsen suggests that Rosling is misleading the world, that there wasn’t good data collected on poverty two hundred years ago. And this is offered as a kind of gotcha! But this is no one’s claim. This “bad data” was based on one hundred of the best sources that could be found on the topic and then these were critically assessed, with sources and methods available to all. That’s quite the con that Rosling had going on.

Further, and worse, Paulsen pretends not to know (from anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, oral and written history, and more…) that the vast majority of humans who ever lived, if they made it much past birth, had a grueling, often violent, existence. Even just speaking of Europeans in North America, many who arrived here before the 20th century did not choose to come and could not possibly have paid for the voyage themselves if they had. Instead many were prisoners, prostitutes, vagrants, or orphans who came as indentured servants (what most of us would call slaves today). This was how the UK, for one, dealt with its “unwanted surplus” of humans – like Irish Catholics (considered “naturally inferior.”) Is this part of the Paulen’s “noncommodified activities”? Those that weren’t indentured slaves in the 1620s or 1780s took up jobs like rag-picker, shit-shoveler, or in passive leisure work like mining, logging, or fishing. Does this fit into the “healthy living and enjoyment of the lands and waters” that Paulsen tells us was rampant prior to proletarianization and is not well accounted for by Rosling?

Most hilariously, Paulsen picks out a quote from Rosling and mocks it for his readers: “‘Look for systems, not heroes’ … When something good happens, ‘give the system some credit,’ [writes Rosling]. But it’s unclear exactly what ‘system’ [he] has in mind.” Well, dearest Paulsen and readers, the whole preceding chapter of Rosling’s book, chapter nine, is on that precisely. Immediately before the bit Paulsen snips, Rosling writes “recognize when scapegoating is being used and remember that blaming an individual often steals the focus from other possible explanations and blocks our ability to prevent similar problems in the future.” (I can see why Paulsen would leave that bit out.) Here, Rosling asks us to not spend our energy blaming the sleepy pilot for the plane crash but to try and figure out why he fell asleep. He asks us not to blame journalists or refugees or foreigners or individual businesses and to not look for solutions from CEOs or politicians or Popes but to look to systems. Why? Well, he says. He says that if you want to change the world you have to discover and understand what are always multiple, complex, dynamic interacting causes (aka: “systems”.) These are the immediately preceding sentences and paragraphs to the quote Paulsen pulls. What (the actual fuck) is this guy up to?

Worse still, and most depressing, is Paulsen’s offering that “Rosling must have worked hard to ignore the data on mental health” and then he gives us some reports and data from 2017-2019 – all from after Hans Rosling died (!!!) I too am willing to bet Hans was ignorant of that 2018 New York Times report “that drug overdose deaths actually caused life expectancy to drop over the previous three years”; and also the September 2019 study funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Why? Oh, that’s right, because he’d been in the grave for years at that point. Same for the WHO report from 2018.

But Paulsen just won’t quit there. He goes on, telling his readers:

So widespread is this type of suffering that, in [October] 2017, the WHO mounted a one-year global campaign to raise awareness of depression. Rosling chooses to ignore facts like these that strike a discordant note with the New Optimist notion that economic growth is a panacea.

And where was Hans Rosling while all this was going on? Well, he had been diagnosed with incurable pancreatic cancer in 2016 and was dead by February 7, 2017 (with his book published posthumously.) But what’s really messed up about this is the fact that in life Hans Rosling actually wrote whole papers on mental health. In 2005, for example, one on suicide in Asia, it’s predictors and preventions, in which he talks about suicide as being “among the dominant causes of young people’s deaths worldwide.” Pretending he was ignorant or concealing mental health data (in life or death) is ludicrous.

But Paulsen isn't done. He continues his slam (slandering a dead man who can’t answer back and to an audience that agrees with him) by offering that:

Rosling doesn’t make a single note in Factfulness on potentiality and our increasing capacity to end poverty. To exclusively discuss social progress based on a certain set of facts removes moral values from the debate. Facts only point to that which is and has been, but when we argue about values such as freedom or justice, we are considering the less measurable, counterfactual world of what might have been or what might be. This is precisely the world that the New Optimists refuse to acknowledge.

Right. Except that this is what precisely Rosling’s entire life’s work and the subject of this very book being critiqued was about. Rosling's whole purpose in writing this book was to illuminate our ignorance. Why? In order to get people to see not just where real progress has been made but also that there are opportunities to make things better – and strategies for doing that. Paulsen's is quite the alternate reading.

And with that I present you the leader of the Nouveau Nihilists and their outlandish brand of discourse.