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

by Hans Rosling

The UN’s ReliefWeb has become a global coordinator for disaster help—something earlier generations of disaster victims could only dream of. And it is paid for by taxpayers on Level 4. We should be very proud of it. We humans have finally figured out how to protect ourselves against nature. The huge reduction in deaths from natural disasters is yet another trend to add to the pile of mankind’s ignored, unknown success stories. Unfortunately, the people on Level 4 paying for ReliefWeb are the same people we asked about the trend in natural disasters. Ninety-one percent of them are unaware of the success they are paying for because their journalists continue to report every disaster as if it were the worst. The long, elegantly dropping trend line, a bit of fact-based hope, they think is not newsworthy.