Um indicador melhor que o IDH

Indicadores nos dão uma visão objetiva e consistente do progresso, seja em nossa organização, seja em um país. O trecho adiante, retirado do livro Factfulness, recomendado pelo Bill Gates, mostra como as métricas podem ser úteis. Vale a leitura.

It was October 1995 and little did I know that after my class that evening, I was going to start my lifelong fight against global misconceptions. “What is the child mortality rate in Saudi Arabia? Don’t raise your hands. Just shout it out.” I had handed out copies of tables 1 and 5 from UNICEF’s yearbook. The handouts looked dull, but I was excited.

A choir of students shouted in unison: “thirty-five.”

“Yes. Thirty-five. Correct. This means that 35 children die before their fifth birthday out of every thousand live births. Give me the number now for Malaysia?”

“fourteen,” came the chorus.

As the numbers were thrown back at me, I scribbled them with a green pen onto a plastic film on the overhead projector.

“Fourteen,” I repeated. “Fewer than Saudi Arabia!”

My dyslexia played a little trick on me and I wrote “Malaisya.” The students laughed.




“one hundred and seventy-one.”

I put the pen down and said, “Do you know why I’m obsessed with the numbers for the child mortality rate? It’s not only that I care about children. This measure takes the temperature of a whole society. Like a huge thermometer. Because children are very fragile. There are so many things that can kill them. When only 14 children die out of 1,000 in Malaysia, this means that the other 986 survive. Their parents and their society manage to protect them from all the dangers that could have killed them: germs, starvation, violence, and so on. So this number 14 tells us that most families in Malaysia have enough food, their sewage systems don’t leak into their drinking water, they have good access to primary health care, and mothers can read and write. It doesn’t just tell us about the health of children. It measures the quality of the whole society.

“Just so you know,” I said, “you won’t find any countries where child mortality has increased. Because the world in general is getting better. Let’s have a short coffee break.”

Referência: FACTFULNESS: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. Parte do resumo disponível em Acesso em 30.05.18.

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