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

by Hans Rosling

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.

Think about the world. War, violence, natural disasters, man-made disasters, corruption. Things are bad, and it feels like they are getting worse, right? The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer; and the number of poor just keeps increasing; and we will soon run out of resources unless we do something drastic. At least that’s the picture that most Westerners see in the media and carry around in their heads. I call it the overdramatic worldview. It’s stressful and misleading.

if your worldview is wrong, then you will systematically make wrong guesses.

Our brains often jump to swift conclusions without much thinking, which used to help us to avoid immediate dangers. We are interested in gossip and dramatic stories, which used to be the only source of news and useful information. We crave sugar and fat, which used to be life-saving sources of energy when food was scarce. We have many instincts that used to be useful thousands of years ago, but we live in a very different world now.

Uncontrolled, our appetite for the dramatic goes too far, prevents us from seeing the world as it is, and leads us terribly astray.

One reason the old labels are so popular is that they are so simple.

Your most important challenge in developing a fact-based worldview is to realize that most of your firsthand experiences are from Level 4; and that your secondhand experiences are filtered through the mass media, which loves nonrepresentative extraordinary events and shuns normality.

Factfulness is … recognizing when a story talks about a gap, and remembering that this paints a picture of two separate groups, with a gap in between. The reality is often not polarized at all. Usually the majority is right there in the middle, where the gap is supposed to be. To control the gap instinct, look for the majority.

Warning: Objects in Your Memories Were Worse Than They Appear

Beyond living memory, for some reason we avoid reminding ourselves and our children about the miseries and brutalities of the past.

Factfulness is … recognizing when we get negative news, and remembering that information about bad events is much more likely to reach us.

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.

To the patient, I shouted, “Where does it hurt?” “Yazhe shisha … na adjezhizha zha…” he replied. I couldn’t understand a word, but it sounded like Russian. I looked the man in his eyes and said with a clear voice, “все тихо товарищ, шведскaya больницa,” which means “All is calm, comrade, Swedish hospital.”

Critical thinking is always difficult, but it’s almost impossible when we are scared. There’s no room for facts when our minds are occupied by fear.

These unusual events are more newsworthy than everyday ones. And the unusual stories we are constantly shown by the media paint pictures in our heads. If we are not extremely careful, we come to believe that the unusual is usual: that this is what the world looks like.

The world seems scarier than it is because what you hear about it has been selected—by your own attention filter or by the media—precisely because it is scary.

To understand most of the world’s significant problems we have to look beyond a guilty individual and to the system.

When we have a fact-based worldview, we can see that the world is not as bad as it seems—and we can see what we have to do to keep making it better.