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

by Hans Rosling

The solution is not to balance out all the negative news with more positive news. That would just risk creating a self-deceiving, comforting, misleading bias in the other direction. It would be as helpful as balancing too much sugar with too much salt. It would make things more exciting, but maybe even less healthy. A solution that works for me is to persuade myself to keep two thoughts in my head at the same time.

It seems that when we hear someone say things are getting better, we think they are also saying “don’t worry, relax” or even “look away.” But when I say things are getting better, I am not saying those things at all. I am certainly not advocating looking away from the terrible problems in the world.

Think of the world as a premature baby in an incubator. The baby’s health status is extremely bad and her breathing, heart rate, and other important signs are tracked constantly so that changes for better or worse can quickly be seen. After a week, she is getting a lot better. On all the main measures, she is improving, but she still has to stay in the incubator because her health is still critical. Does it make sense to say that the infant’s situation is improving? Yes. Absolutely. Does it make sense to say it is bad? Yes, absolutely. Does saying “things are improving” imply that everything is fine, and we should all relax and not worry? No, not at all. Is it helpful to have to choose ...

Factfulness is … recognizing when we get negative news, and remembering that information about bad events is much more likely to reach us. When things are getting better we often don’t hear about them. This gives us a systematically too-negative impression of the world around us, which is very stressful. To control the negativity instinct, expect bad news.

Better and bad. Practice distinguishing between a level (e.g., bad) and a direction of change (e.g., better). Convince yourself that things can be both better and bad.

Good news is not news. Good news is almost never reported. So news is almost always bad. When you see bad news, ask whether equally positive news would have reached you. • Gradual improvement is not news. When a trend is gradually improving, with periodic dips, you are more likely to notice the dips than the overall improvement. • More news does not equal more suffering. More bad news is sometimes due to better surveillance of suffering, not a worsening world. • Beware of rosy pasts. People often glorify their early experiences, and nations often glorify their histories.

Until 1800, women gave birth to six children on average. So the population should have increased with each generation. Instead, it stayed more or less stable. Remember the child skeletons in the graveyards of the past? On average four out of six children died before becoming parents themselves, leaving just two surviving children to parent the next generation. There was a balance. It wasn’t because humans lived in balance with nature. Humans died in balance with nature. It was utterly brutal and tragic.

Today, humanity is once again reaching a balance. The number of parents is no longer increasing. But this balance is dramatically different from the old balance. The new balance is nice: the typical parents have two children, and neither of them dies. For the first time in human history, we live in balance.

When combining all the parents living on Levels 2, 3, and 4, from every region of the world, and of every religion or no religion, together they have on average two children. No kidding! This includes the populations of Iran, Mexico, India, Tunisia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka, just to name a few examples.

The poorest 10 percent combined still have five children on average.

Your tomato plant will grow as long as it gets water. So, if more water is what it needs, why don’t you turn the hose on it, so you can grow an enormous prize-winning tomato? Of course you know that doesn’t work. It’s a question of dosage. Too little and it dies. Too much and it dies too. Tomato survival is low in very dry and very wet environments, but high in environments that are in the middle. Similarly, there are some phenomena that are lower in countries on Level 1 and countries on Level 4, but higher in middle-income countries—which means the majority of countries.

Dental health, for example, gets worse as people move from Level 1 to Level 2, then improves again on Level 4. This is because people start to eat sweets as soon as they can afford them, but their governments cannot afford to prioritize preventive public education about tooth decay until Level 3.

Motor vehicle accidents show a similar hump-shaped pattern. Countries on Level 1 have fewer motor vehicles per person, so they do not have many motor vehicle accidents. In countries on Levels 2 and 3, the poorest people keep walking the roads while others start to travel by motor vehicles—minibuses and motorcycles—but roads, traffic regulations, and traffic education are still poor, so accidents reach a peak, before they decline again in countries on Level 4. The same goes for child drownings as a percentage of all deaths.

Finally, doubling. The doubling pattern of the Ebola virus is actually a very common type of pattern in nature. For example, the number of E. coli bacteria in a body can explode in just a few days because it can double every 12 hours: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 … The world of transport also contains many doubling patterns. As people’s incomes increase, the distance they travel each year keeps doubling. So does the share of their income that they spend on transport. On Level 4, transport is behind one-third of all CO2 emissions—which also double with income.

Don’t assume straight lines. Many trends do not follow straight lines but are S-bends, slides, humps, or doubling lines. No child ever kept up the rate of growth it achieved in its first six months, and no parents would expect it to.

There’s no room for facts when our minds are occupied by fear.

Imagine that we have a shield, or attention filter, between the world and our brain. This attention filter protects us against the noise of the world: without it, we would constantly be bombarded with so much information we would be overloaded and paralyzed. Then imagine that the attention filter has ten instinct-shaped holes in it—gap, negativity, straight line, and so on.

we end up paying attention to information that fits our dramatic instincts, and ignoring information that does not.

Yet here’s the paradox: the image of a dangerous world has never been broadcast more effectively than it is now, while the world has never been less violent and more safe.

In fact, the number of deaths from acts of nature has dropped far below half. It is now just 25 percent of what it was 100 years ago. The human population increased by 5 billion people over the same period, so the drop in deaths per capita is even more amazing. It has fallen to just 6 percent of what it was 100 years ago.

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.

For ten days or so in 2015 the world was watching the images from Nepal, where 9,000 people had died. During the same ten days, diarrhea from contaminated drinking water also killed 9,000 children across the world.

Today, conflicts and fatalities from conflicts are at a record low.

The general trend toward less violence is not just one more improvement. It is the most beautiful trend there is.

During the 1950s the early environmental movement in the United States started to raise concerns about levels of DDT accumulating up the food chain into fish and even birds. The great popular science writer Rachel Carson reported her finding that the shells of bird eggs in her area were becoming thinner in Silent Spring, a book that became a global bestseller. The idea that humans were allowed to spread invisible substances to kill bugs, and authorities were looking away from any signs of the wider impact on other animals or on humans, was of course frightening. A fear of insufficient regulation and of irresponsible companies was ignited and the global environmental movement was born. Thanks to this movement—and to further contamination scandals involving oil spills, plantation workers disabled by pesticides, nuclear reactor failures—the world today has decent chemical and safety regulations covering many countries (though still not close to the impressive coverage of the aviation industry). DDT was banned in several countries and aid agencies had to stop using it.

But. As a side effect, we have been left with a level of public fear of chemical contamination that almost resembles paranoia. It is called chemophobia.

as dramatic earthquakes receive more news coverage than diarrhea, small but scary chemical contaminations receive more news coverage than more harmful but less dramatic environmental deteriorations, such as the dying seabed and the urgent matter of overfishing.

Paying too much attention to what is frightening rather than what is dangerous—that is, paying too much attention to fear—creates a tragic drainage of energy in the wrong directions.

Organizing, supporting, and supervising basic community-based health care that could treat diarrhea, pneumonia, and malaria before they became life-threatening would save many more lives than putting drips on terminally ill children in the hospital. It would, I believed, be truly unethical to spend more resources in the hospital before the majority of the population—and the 98.7 percent of dying children who never reached the hospital—had some form of basic health care.

“In the deepest poverty you should never do anything perfectly. If you do you are stealing resources from where they can be better used.”

Just as I have urged you to look behind the statistics at the individual stories, I also urge you to look behind the individual stories at the statistics. The world cannot be understood without numbers. And it cannot be understood with numbers alone.

The Size Instinct

The media is this instinct’s friend. It is pretty much a journalist’s professional duty to make any given event, fact, or number sound more important than it is. And journalists know that it feels almost inhuman to look away from an individual in pain.

The two aspects of the size instinct, together with the negativity instinct, make us systematically underestimate the progress that has been made in the world.

In the test questions about global proportions, people consistently say about 20 percent of people are having their basic needs met. The correct answer in most cas...

At the same time, we systematically overestimate other proportions. The proportion of immigrants in our countries. The proportion of people opposed to homosexuality.

if you are investing money to improve health on Level 1 or 2, you should put it into primary schools, nurse education, and vaccinations. Big impressive-looking hospitals can wait.

Over a period of two weeks, 31 people had died from swine flu, and a news search on Google brought up 253,442 articles about it. That was 8,176 articles per death. Over the same two-week period, I calculated that roughly 63,066 people had died of tuberculosis (TB). Almost all these people were on Levels 1 and 2, where TB remains a major killer even though it can now be treated. But TB is infectious and TB strains can become resistant and kill many people on Level 4. The news coverage for TB was at a rate of 0.1 article per death. Each swine flu death received 82,000 times more attention than each equally tragic death from TB.

By 2040, 60 percent of Level 4 consumers will live outside the West. Yes, I think the Western domination of the world economy will soon be over.

In terms of economic muscles “we” are becoming the 20 percent, not the 80 percent. But many of “us” can’t fit these numbers into our nostalgic minds.

The infant mortality rate has changed from 15 percent to 3 percent.

the systematic blaming of climate change on China and India based on total emissions per nation. It was like claiming that obesity was worse in China than in the United States because the total bodyweight of the Chinese population was higher than that of the US population.

Whether measuring HIV, GDP, mobile phone sales, internet users, or CO2 emissions, a per capita measurement—i.e., a rate per person—will almost always be more meaningful.

When I see a lonely number in a news report, it always triggers an alarm: What should this lonely number be compared to? What was that number a year ago? Ten years ago? What is it in a comparable country or region? And what should it be divided by? What is the total of which this is a part? What would this be per person? I compare the rates, and only then do I decide whether it really is an important number.

The gap instinct divides the world into “us” and “them,” and the generalization instinct makes “us” think of “them” as all the same.

Western manufacturers have completely missed this. Instead, when hunting for new customers they are often stuck dreaming up new needs among the 300 million menstruating women on Level 4. “What if we market an even thinner pad for bikinis? What about pads that are invisible, to wear under Lycra? How about one pad for each kind of outfit, each situation, each sport? Special pads for mountain climbers!” Ideally, all the pads are so small they need to be replaced several times a day. But like most rich consumer markets, the basic needs are already met, and producers fight in vain to create demand in ever-smaller segments. Meanwhile, on Levels 2 and 3, roughly 2 billion menstruating women have few alternatives to choose from. These women don’t wear Lycra and won’t spend money on ultrathin pads. They demand a low-cost pad that will be reliable throughout the day so they don’t have to change it when they are out at work. And when they find a product they like, they will probably stick to that brand for their whole lives and recommend it to their daughters. The same logic applies to many other consumer products, and I have given hundreds of lectures to business leaders making this same point. The majority of the world population is steadily moving up the levels. The number of people on Level 3 will increase from two billion to four billion between now and 2040. Almost everyone in the world is becoming a consumer. If you suffer from the misconception that most of the world is still...

I remember this whole experience as the first time in my life that I suddenly had to change my worldview: my assumption that I was superior because of where I came from, the idea that the West was the best and the rest would never catch up. At that moment, 45 years ago, I understood that the West would not dominate the world for much longer.

It will be helpful to you if you always assume your categories are misleading. Here are five powerful ways to keep questioning your favorite categories: look for differences within and similarities across groups; beware of “the majority”; beware of exceptional examples; assume you are not “normal”; and beware of generalizing from one group to another.

Country stereotypes simply fall apart when you look at the huge differences within countries and the equally huge similarities between countries on the same income level, independent of culture or religion.

majority just means more than half. It could mean 51 percent. It could mean 99 percent. If possible, ask for the percentage.