Happy international ignorance day steemians!

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Happy International Ignorance Day everyone! It’s April 1st and the amazing non-profit Gapminder wants to show us just how little we know about the current state of the world.

They have a test for us that you can take here: Gapminder test 2018

While doing so I have two challenges for you:

1. Get at least 12 out of the 13 multiple choice questions correct (Even after following Gapminders work for years and knowing this quiz inside and out, I still managed to get one question wrong, that's going to bug me all day!)

2. Get more questions right that a monkey blindly whacking away at you keyboard (a feat that is surprisingly hard)

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Ok are you done? Great, how did you do?

Bet you thought you had a pretty good grasp on the world didn’t you? So did I when I first saw questions similar to these a few years ago (at an a talk given by the effortlessly inspiring founder of Gapminder, Hans Rosling). However, like many people in the room that day I vastly underestimated the amazing progress the world has seen over the last 10-20 years, to the extent that I would have done better by just hitting the buttons at random.

Why is this, why did I (and I don’t know, possibly you?) have such a pessimistic view of the world?

It’s not so much a bad thing, in fact it's more a testimony of how much and how quickly the world has improved lately (that's my excuse anyway). Most of us learn about the current state of the world when we’re in high school, that was over 10 years ago for me now, and it’s likely that even then we were working off of old information. Since that time we only ever really get a glimpse of the whole global development story, usually buried at the bottom of the days news if at all.

The folks over at at Our World in Data have a wonderful way of looking at this issue: Slow News

They ask us to imagine a newspaper that is only published every 50 years, what slow news stories would that show? What stories have taken decades to unfold and have change our world immeasurably?

There’ll be bad news to put in it for sure, like this:

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There’ll be some things we may want to keep an eye on as we go forward, like this:

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But there will be a whole treasure trove of good news to put in there. The type of news that doesn't get the same priority in the 24 hour news cycle as a plane crash or political scandal. Stories of such importance that they touch billions of us, and, personally, makes me very proud to be part of a species thats capable of doing amazing things, like this:

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this:

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this:

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and for sure the thing that allows me to tell you all this today, this:

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The next issue of our newspaper is currently being written and I for one am excited to read it!

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Incidentally some of you may be interested that all of Our World in Data’s images are CC BY-SA license. Which I’m assuming may make them highly useful for this community. They have more on this here

Sources:

Gapminder

NPR: The 50-year Newspaper

Our World in Data