In the 1990s, a professor at a medical university in Stockholm decided to test his students' knowledge about the progress of global development. He was staggered to discover the class, some of the brightest people in Sweden, scored fewer than two out of five on average.
Chimpanzees randomly choosing answers would likely have done better, scoring half right....
Rosling has been on a mission to inform since the realization that his students -- and his fellow professors -- were somewhat woefully informed about the state of the world. Today CNN publishes Rosling's latest survey of the United States which shows Americans, like most of the world, are far behind the reality in their understanding of world development but ahead of some -- for example, Swedes.
This ten-question test is - reportedly - harder than most. I did not think it was particularly difficult. I knew the answers to a couple of questions, which helped. When I had to guess, I based my answer on two assumptions:
- Reality does not have a "liberal bias", and
- The mainstream media absolutely does have a liberal bias.
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