During our last English lesson we saw a BBC video, belonging to the series The Joy of Stats, regarding statistics and its applications in the real world. Since statistics may be boring, as many people don’t like figures or tables, the producers tried to convey data in a funnier and simpler way, with the help of animation. The presenter, a professor of statistics, used 3D graphics to manipulate a Cartesian diagram where the two axes represented, respectively, life expectancy and the average income of people; some coloured balloons represented 200 states from different continents. The presenter could also change the speed of time, making it slower or faster in order to show the transformations happening over the years. He started from 1810, when the Industrial Revolution was just at its beginning in England and in a few other States. At that time all the balloons (and thus the countries) were in the down left corner of the diagram, meaning that they were sick and poor; there were not many differences from one continent to another.

Then, as the decades progressed, the divide between industrialized countries of Europe and America, and the poor states of Africa and Asia started to enlarge, as the first ones moved to the top right corner of the diagram. Even if there were some inversions in this movement (such as the one caused by the First World War and the Spanish epidemic), the gap increased until 1948. In this year, shortly after the end of the Second World War, European countries and the USA reached the top of the diagram, Japan was developing fast, but most countries were stuck in the lower part.

However, after this time, countries like China, India and Brazil began to move quickly towards the “rich and wealthy” corner, till the simulation stopped at year 2009 (one year before the production of the documentary). As the presenter remarked, there was a clear tendency of all countries to move towards the top-right corner, although he evidenced great disparities between one region and another: in China, Shanghai was almost as rich as Italy, while poor agricultural regions were far away from this point.

The most important conclusion one can draw from this video is that industrialization is a still going on process, which advantaged Europe and the USA at first, but it is now involving Asia and Africa too; as a consequence, the entire world is starting to be more connected and interdependent, as countries which were once negligible have now gained a relevant position on the global scene. Developing countries are only at the beginning of the road to modernity, since people living there are still fighting for their rights; however their future development may lead either to an happy or to a disastrous scenario: if the growth tendency continues in the future, we will have a rich, healthy world where disparities are just a bad memory, but it is also possible a polluted world, without enough water and electricity for everyone.

All this contributes to underline the importance of statistics, as an instrument which can help us to better understand the past in order to better plan the future, and the BBC program has the great merit to make easier and funnier the hard concepts of statistics.