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

by Hans Rosling

Extreme poverty statistic

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.

It is not a question of intelligence. Everyone seems to get the world devastatingly wrong.

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.

Stressful and misleading worldview

This is the fact-based worldview.

Fact based worldview—things gradually getting better

This is because illusions don’t happen in our eyes, they happen in our brains.

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

This is data as you have never known it: it is data as therapy. It is understanding as a source of mental peace. Because the world is not as dramatic as it seems.

Data as therapy!

Start to practice it, and you will be able to replace your overdramatic worldview with a worldview based on facts.

I want people, when they realize they have been wrong about the world, to feel not embarrassment, but that childlike sense of wonder, inspiration, and curiosity that I remember from the circus, and that I still get every time I discover I have been wrong: “Wow, how is that even possible?”

When wrong, feel childlike sense of wonder rather than embarrassment

So, if you are more interested in being right than in continuing to live in your bubble; if you are willing to change your worldview; if you are ready for critical thinking to replace instinctive reaction; and if you are feeling humble, curious, and ready to be amazed—then please read on.

But while the world has changed, the worldview has not, at least in the heads of the “Westerners.”

Most of us are stuck with a completely outdated idea about the rest of the world.

And we should all stop using the simple pairs of categories that suggest there is.

Today, most people, 75 percent, live in middle-income countries. Not poor, not rich, but somewhere in the middle and starting to live a reasonable life.

We now know that people believe that life in low-income countries is much worse than it actually is.

low-income countries are much more developed than most people think.

The idea of a divided world with a majority stuck in misery and deprivation is an illusion. A complete misconception. Simply wrong.

People on Level 4 must struggle hard not to misunderstand the reality of the other 6 billion people in the world. (Roughly 1 billion people live like this today.)

Often it takes several generations for a family to move from Level 1 to Level 4.

Just 200 years ago, 85 percent of the world population was still on Level 1, in extreme poverty.

I think this is because human beings have a strong dramatic instinct toward binary thinking, a basic urge to divide things into two distinct groups, with nothing but an empty gap in between. We love to dichotomize. Good versus bad. Heroes versus villains. My country versus the rest. Dividing the world into two distinct sides is simple and intuitive, and also dramatic because it implies conflict, and we do it without thinking, all the time.

The gap instinct makes us imagine division where there is just a smooth range, difference where there is convergence, and conflict where there is agreement.

Averages mislead by hiding a spread (a range of different numbers) in a single number.

What do you need to hunt, capture, and replace misconceptions? Data. You have to show the data and describe the reality behind it.

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.

Factfulness and recognizing the gap

be careful jumping to any conclusions if the differences are smaller than say, roughly, 10 percent.)

As long as people have a worldview that is so much more negative than reality, pure statistics can make them feel more positive.

Graphs on how things are getting better and bad things are lessening

our surveillance of suffering has improved tremendously. This improved reporting is itself a sign of human progress, but it creates the impression of the exact opposite.

Surveillance of suffering has improved!

I’m a very serious “possibilist.” That’s something I made up. It means someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason, someone who constantly resists the overdramatic worldview. As a possibilist, I see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible. This is not optimistic. It is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful.

I am a possiblist

I see no conflict between celebrating this progress and continuing to fight for more.

I see no conflict between celebrating this progress and continuing to fight for more.

The loss of hope is probably the most devastating consequence of the negativity instinct and the ignorance it causes.

A solution that works for me is to persuade myself to keep two thoughts in my head at the same time.

I am saying that things can be both bad and better.

It’s both bad and better. Better, and bad, at the same time.

When we are afraid, we do not see clearly.

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.

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.

The memory of insufficient regulation has created automatic mistrust and fear, which blocks the ability to hear data-driven arguments.

So if you are skeptical about the measles vaccination, I ask you to do two things. First, make sure you know what it looks like when a child dies from measles. Most children who catch measles recover, but there is still no cure and even with the best modern medicine, one or two in every thousand will die of it. Second, ask yourself, “What kind of evidence would convince me to change my mind?” If the answer is “no evidence could ever change my mind about vaccination,” then you are putting yourself outside evidence-based rationality, outside the very critical thinking that first brought you to this point. In that case, to be consistent in your skepticism about science, next time you have an operation please ask your surgeon not to bother washing her hands.

in some cases—Fukushima, DDT—fear of an invisible substance has run amok and is doing more harm than the substance is itself.

Chemophobia also means that every six months there is a “new scientific finding” about a synthetic chemical found in regular food in very low quantities that, if you ate a cargo ship or two of it every day for three years, could kill you.

In the United States, the risk that your loved one will be killed by a drunk person is nearly 50 times higher than the risk he or she will be killed by a terrorist.

“frightening” and “dangerous” are two different things. Something frightening poses a perceived risk. Something dangerous poses a real risk. 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. It makes a terrified junior doctor think about nuclear war when he should be treating hypothermia, and it makes whole populations focus on earthquakes and crashing planes and invisible substances when millions are dying from diarrhea and seafloors are becoming underwater deserts. I would like my fear to be focused on the mega dangers of today, and not the dangers from our evolutionary past.

But almost all the increased child survival is achieved through preventive measures outside hospitals by local nurses, midwives, and well-educated parents. Especially mothers: the data shows that half the increase in child survival in the world happens because the mothers can read and write.

So 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.

Yes, I think the Western domination of the world economy will soon be over.

A lonely number always makes me suspicious that I will misinterpret it. A number that I have compared and divided can instead fill me with hope.

“But from now on we count carbon dioxide emission per person.”