Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think Read online

  About the Author

  Hans Rosling was a medical doctor, professor of international health, and renowned public educator. He was an adviser to the World Health Organization and UNICEF, and he cofounded Médecins Sans Frontières in Sweden and the Gapminder Foundation. His TED talks have been viewed more than thirty-five million times, and he was listed as one of Time magazine’s one hundred most influential people in the world. Hans died in 2017, having devoted the last years of his life to writing this book.

  Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Hans’s son and daughter-in-law, are cofounders of the Gapminder Foundation, and Ola its director from 2005 to 2007 and from 2010 to the present day. After Google acquired Trendalyzer, the bubblechart tool invented and designed by Anna and Ola, Ola became head of Google’s Public Data Team and Anna became the team’s senior user-experience (UX) designer. They have both received international awards for their work.

  www.sceptrebooks.com

  First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Sceptre

  An imprint of Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Factfulness AB 2018

  The right of Factfulness AB to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Designed by Steven Seighman

  Illustrations and charts are based on free material from the Gapminder Foundation, designed by Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 473 63748 1

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

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  www.sceptrebooks.com

  To the brave barefoot woman,

  whose name I don’t know but whose rational arguments

  saved me from being sliced

  by a mob of angry men with machetes

  Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Introduction

  CHAPTER ONE: The Gap Instinct

  CHAPTER TWO: The Negativity Instinct

  CHAPTER THREE: The Straight Line Instinct

  CHAPTER FOUR: The Fear Instinct

  CHAPTER FIVE: The Size Instinct

  CHAPTER SIX: The Generalization Instinct

  CHAPTER SEVEN: The Destiny Instinct

  CHAPTER EIGHT: The Single Perspective Instinct

  CHAPTER NINE: The Blame Instinct

  CHAPTER TEN: The Urgency Instinct

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: Factfulness in Practice

  Factfulness Rules of Thumb

  Outro

  Acknowledgments

  APPENDIX: How Did Your Country Do?

  Notes

  Sources

  Biographical Notes

  Footnotes

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Factfulness is written in my voice, as if by me alone, and tells many stories from my life. But please don’t be misled. Just like the TED talks and lectures I have been giving all over the world for the past ten years, this book is the work of three people, not one.

  I am usually the front man. I stand onstage and deliver the lectures. I receive the applause. But everything you hear in my lectures, and everything you read in this book, is the output of eighteen years of intense collaboration between me, my son Ola Rosling, and my daughter-in-law Anna Rosling Rönnlund.

  In 2005 we founded the Gapminder Foundation, with a mission to fight devastating ignorance with a fact-based worldview. I brought energy, curiosity, and a lifetime of experience as a doctor, a researcher, and a lecturer in global health. Ola and Anna were responsible for the data analysis, inventive visual explanations, data stories, and simple presentation design. It was their idea to measure ignorance systematically, and they designed and programmed our beautiful animated bubble charts. Dollar Street, a way of using photographs as data to explain the world, was Anna’s brainchild. While I was getting ever angrier about people’s ignorance about the world, Ola and Anna instead took the analysis beyond anger and crystallized the humble and relaxing idea of Factfulness. Together we defined the practical thinking tools that we present in this book.

  What you are about to read was not invented according to the “lone genius” stereotype. It is instead the result of constant discussion, argument, and collaboration between three people with different talents, knowledge, and perspectives. This unconventional, often infuriating, but deeply productive way of working has led to a way of presenting the world and how to think about it, that I never could have created on my own.

  INTRODUCTION

  Why I Love the Circus

  I love the circus. I love to watch a juggler throwing screaming chain saws in the air, or a tightrope walker performing ten flips in a row. I love the spectacle and the sense of amazement and delight at witnessing the seemingly impossible.

  When I was a child my dream was to become a circus artist. My parents’ dream, though, was for me to get the good education they never had. So I ended up studying medicine.

  One afternoon at medical school, in an otherwise dry lecture about the way the throat worked, our professor explained, “If something is stuck, the passage can be straightened by pushing the chin bone forward.” To illustrate, he showed an X-ray of a sword swallower in action.

  I had a flash of inspiration. My dream was not over! A few weeks earlier, when studying reflexes, I had discovered that of all my classmates, I could push my fingers farthest down my throat without gagging. At the time, I had not been too proud: I didn’t think it was an important skill. But now I understood its value, and instantly my childhood dream sprang back to life. I decided to become a sword swallower.

  My initial attempts weren’t encouraging. I didn’t own a sword so used a fishing rod instead, but no matter how many times I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and tried, I’d get as far as an inch and it would get stuck. Eventually, for a second time, I gave up on my dream.

  Three years later I was a trainee doctor on a real medical ward. One of my first patients was an old man with a persistent cough. I would always ask what my patients did for a living, in case it was relevant, and it turned out he used to swallow swords. Imagine my surprise when this patient turned out to be the very same sword swallower from the X-ray! And imagine this, when I told him all about my attempts with the fishing rod. “Young doctor,” he said, “don’t you know the throat is flat? You can only slide flat things down there. That is why we use a sword.”

  That night after work I found a soup ladle with a straight flat handle and immediately resumed my practice. Soon I could slide the handle all the way down my throat. I was excited, but being a soup ladle shaft swallower was not my dream. The next day, I put an ad in the local paper and soon I had acquired what I needed: a Swedish army bayonet from 1809. As I successfully slid it down my throat, I felt both deeply proud of my achievement and smug that I had found such a great way to recycle weapons.

  Sword swallowin
g has always shown that the seemingly impossible can be possible, and inspired humans to think beyond the obvious. Occasionally I demonstrate this ancient Indian art at the end of one of my lectures on global development. I step up onto a table and rip off my professorial checked shirt to reveal a black vest top decorated with a gold sequined lightning bolt. I call for complete silence, and to the swirling beat of a snare drum I slowly slide the army bayonet down my throat. I stretch out my arms. The audience goes wild.

  Test Yourself

  This book is about the world, and how to understand it. So why start with the circus? And why would I end a lecture by showing off in a sparkly top? I’ll soon explain. But first, I would like you to test your knowledge about the world. Please find a piece of paper and a pencil and answer the 13 fact questions below.

  1. In all low-income countries across the world today, how many girls finish primary school?

  A: 20 percent

  B: 40 percent

  C: 60 percent

  2. Where does the majority of the world population live?

  A: Low-income countries

  B: Middle-income countries

  C: High-income countries

  3. In the last 20 years, the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has …

  A: almost doubled

  B: remained more or less the same

  C: almost halved

  4. What is the life expectancy of the world today?

  A: 50 years

  B: 60 years

  C: 70 years

  5. There are 2 billion children in the world today, aged 0 to 15 years old. How many children will there be in the year 2100, according to the United Nations?

  A: 4 billion

  B: 3 billion

  C: 2 billion

  6. The UN predicts that by 2100 the world population will have increased by another 4 billion people. What is the main reason?

  A: There will be more children (age below 15)

  B: There will be more adults (age 15 to 74)

  C: There will be more very old people (age 75 and older)

  7. How did the number of deaths per year from natural disasters change over the last hundred years?

  A: More than doubled

  B: Remained about the same

  C: Decreased to less than half

  8. There are roughly 7 billion people in the world today. Which map shows best where they live? (Each figure represents 1 billion people.)

  9. How many of the world’s 1-year-old children today have been vaccinated against some disease?

  A: 20 percent

  B: 50 percent

  C: 80 percent

  10. Worldwide, 30-year-old men have spent 10 years in school, on average. How many years have women of the same age spent in school?

  A: 9 years

  B: 6 years

  C: 3 years

  11. In 1996, tigers, giant pandas, and black rhinos were all listed as endangered. How many of these three species are more critically endangered today?

  A: Two of them

  B: One of them

  C: None of them

  12. How many people in the world have some access to electricity?

  A: 20 percent

  B: 50 percent

  C: 80 percent

  13. Global climate experts believe that, over the next 100 years, the average temperature will …

  A: get warmer

  B: remain the same

  C: get colder

  Here are the correct answers:

  1: C, 2: B, 3: C, 4: C, 5: C, 6: B, 7: C, 8: A, 9: C, 10: A, 11: C, 12: C, 13: A

  Score one for each correct answer, and write your total score on your piece of paper.

  Scientists, Chimpanzees, and You

  How did you do? Did you get a lot wrong? Did you feel like you were doing a lot of guessing? If so, let me say two things to comfort you.

  First, when you have finished this book, you will do much better. Not because I will have made you sit down and memorize a string of global statistics. (I am a global health professor, but I’m not crazy.) You’ll do better because I will have shared with you a set of simple thinking tools. These will help you get the big picture right, and improve your sense of how the world works, without you having to learn all the details.

  And second: if you did badly on this test, you are in very good company.

  Over the past decades I have posed hundreds of fact questions like these, about poverty and wealth, population growth, births, deaths, education, health, gender, violence, energy, and the environment—basic global patterns and trends—to thousands of people across the world. The tests are not complicated and there are no trick questions. I am careful only to use facts that are well documented and not disputed. Yet most people do extremely badly.

  Question three, for example, is about the trend in extreme poverty. Over the past twenty years, the proportion of the global population living in extreme poverty has halved. This is absolutely revolutionary. I consider it to be the most important change that has happened in the world in my lifetime. It is also a pretty basic fact to know about life on Earth. But people do not know it. On average only 7 percent—less than one in ten!—get it right.

  (Yes, I have been talking a lot about the decline of global poverty in the Swedish media.)

  The Democrats and Republicans in the United States often claim that their opponents don’t know the facts. If they measured their own knowledge instead of pointing at each other, maybe everyone could become more humble. When we polled in the United States, only 5 percent picked the right answer. The other 95 percent, regardless of their voting preference, believed either that the extreme poverty rate had not changed over the last 20 years, or, worse, that it had actually doubled—which is literally the opposite of what has actually happened.

  Let’s take another example: question nine, about vaccination. Almost all children are vaccinated in the world today. This is amazing. It means that almost all human beings alive today have some access to basic modern health care. But most people do not know this. On average just 13 percent of people get the answer right.

  Eighty-six percent of people get the final question about climate change right. In all the rich countries where we have tested public knowledge in online polls, most people know that climate experts are predicting warmer weather. In just a few decades, scientific findings have gone from the lab to the public. That is a big public-awareness success story.

  Climate change apart though, it is the same story of massive ignorance (by which I do not mean stupidity, or anything intentional, but simply the lack of correct knowledge) for all twelve of the other questions. In 2017 we asked nearly 12,000 people in 14 countries to answer our questions. They scored on average just two correct answers out of the first 12. No one got full marks, and just one person (in Sweden) got 11 out of 12. A stunning 15 percent scored zero.

  Perhaps you think that better-educated people would do better? Or people who are more interested in the issues? I certainly thought that once, but I was wrong. I have tested audiences from all around the world and from all walks of life: medical students, teachers, university lecturers, eminent scientists, investment bankers, executives in multinational companies, journalists, activists, and even senior political decision makers. These are highly educated people who take an interest in the world. But most of them—a stunning majority of them—get most of the answers wrong. Some of these groups even score worse than the general public; some of the most appalling results came from a group of Nobel laureates and medical researchers. It is not a question of intelligence. Everyone seems to get the world devastatingly wrong.

  Not only devastatingly wrong, but systematically wrong. By which I mean that these test results are not random. They are worse than random: they are worse than the results I would get if the people answering my questions had no knowledge at all.

  Imagine I decide to head down to the zoo to test out my questions on the chimpanzees. Imagine I take with me huge armfuls of ba
nanas, each marked either A, B, or C, and throw them into the chimpanzee enclosure. Then I stand outside the enclosure, read out each question in a loud, clear voice, and note down, as each chimpanzee’s “answer,” the letter on the banana she next chooses to eat.

  If I did this (and I wouldn’t ever actually do this, but just imagine), the chimps, by picking randomly, would do consistently better than the well-educated but deluded human beings who take my tests. Through pure luck, the troop of chimps would score 33 percent on each three-answer question, or four out of the first 12 on the whole test. Remember that the humans I have tested get on average just two out of 12 on the same test.

  What’s more, the chimps’ errors would be equally shared between the two wrong answers, whereas the human errors all tend to be in one direction. Every group of people I ask thinks the world is more frightening, more violent, and more hopeless—in short, more dramatic—than it really is.

  Why Don’t We Beat the Chimpanzees?

  How can so many people be so wrong about so much? How is it even possible that the majority of people score worse than chimpanzees? Worse than random!

  When I got my first little glimpse of this massive ignorance, back in the mid-1990s, I was pleased. I had just started teaching a course in global health at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and I was a little nervous. These students were incredibly smart; maybe they would already know everything I had to teach them? What a relief when I discovered that my students knew less about the world than chimpanzees.

  But the more I tested people, the more ignorance I found, not only among my students but everywhere. I found it frustrating and worrying that people were so wrong about the world. When you use the GPS in your car, it is important that it is using the right information. You wouldn’t trust it if it seemed to be navigating you through a different city than the one you were in, because you would know that you would end up in the wrong place. So how could policy makers and politicians solve global problems if they were operating on the wrong facts? How could business people make sensible decisions for their organizations if their worldview were upside down? And how could each person going about their life know which issues they should be stressed and worried about?