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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Hans Rosling
Read between
August 23 - August 27, 2020
Arguing about emissions per nation was pointless when there was such enormous variation in population size.
a per capita measurement—i.e., a rate per person—will almost always be more meaningful.
Ideally, divide by something.
In particular, look for rates per person when comparing between countries or regions.
At that moment, 45 years ago, I understood that the West would not dominate the world for much longer.
Remember that majority just means more than half. It could mean 51 percent. It could mean 99 percent. If possible, ask for the percentage.
We must all try hard not to generalize across incomparable groups. We must all try hard to discover the hidden sweeping generalizations in our logic. They are very difficult to discover. But when presented with new evidence, we must always be ready to question our previous assumptions and reevaluate and admit if we were wrong.
don’t confuse slow change with no change.
But in the social sciences, even the most basic knowledge goes off very quickly. As with milk or vegetables, you have to keep getting it fresh. Because everything changes.
It is better to look at the world in lots of different ways.
A wise prime minister looks at the numbers, but not only at the numbers.
The world cannot be understood without numbers. But the world cannot be understood with numbers alone.
it is wiser to provide and gradually improve primary health care for all.
If the pharmaceutical companies were better at adjusting their prices for different countries and different customers, they could make their next fortune with what they already have.
The challenge is to find the right balance between regulation and freedom.
Anyone who claims that democracy is a necessity for economic growth and health improvements will risk getting contradicted by reality. It’s better to argue for democracy as a goal in itself instead of as a superior means to other goals we like.
The world cannot be understood without numbers, nor through numbers alone. A country cannot function without a government, but the government cannot solve every problem. Neither the public sector nor the private sector is always the answer. No single measure of a good society can drive every other aspect of its development. It’s not either/or. It’s both and it’s case-by-case.
The blame instinct is the instinct to find a clear, simple reason for why something bad has happened.
It seems that it comes very naturally for us to decide that when things go wrong, it must be because of some bad individual with bad intentions. We like to believe that things happen because someone wanted them to, that individuals have power and agency: otherwise, the world feels unpredictable, confusing, and frightening.
This instinct to find a guilty party derails our ability to develop a true, fact-based understanding of the world: it steals our focus as we obsess about someone to blame, then blocks our learning because once we have decided who to punch in the face we stop looking for explanations elsewhere.
Journalists and documentarians are not lying—i.e., not deliberately misleading us—when they produce dramatic reports of a divided world, or of “nature striking back,” or of a population crisis, discussed in serious tones with wistful piano music in the background. They do not necessarily have bad intentions, and blaming them is pointless. Because most of the journalists and filmmakers who inform us about the world are themselves misled. Do not demonize journalists: they have the same mega misconceptions as everyone else.
I think smart and kind people often fail to reach the terrible, guilt-inducing conclusion that our own immigration policies are responsible for the drownings of refugees.
The invisible actors behind most human success are prosaic and dull compared to great, all-powerful leaders. Nevertheless I want to praise them, so let’s throw a parade for the unsung heroes of global development: institutions and technology.
It’s the people, the many, who build a society.
civil servants, nurses, teachers, lawyers, police officers, firefighters, electricians, accountants, and receptionists. These are the people building societies.
Brave and patient servants of a functioning society, rarely ever mentioned—but the true saviors of the world.
In went the laundry, and out came books. Thank you industrialization, thank you steel mill, thank you power station, thank you chemical-processing industry, for giving us the time to read books.
Two billion people today have enough money to use a washing machine and enough time for mothers to read books—because it is almost always the mothers who do the laundry.
resist the urge to blame the media for lying to you (mostly they are not) or for giving you a skewed worldview (which mostly they are, but often not deliberately). Resist blaming experts for focusing too much on their own interests and specializations or for getting things wrong (which sometimes they do, but often with good intentions). In fact, resist blaming any one individual or group of individuals for anything. Because the problem is that when we identify the bad guy, we are done thinking. And it’s almost always more complicated than that. It’s almost always about multiple interacting
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The urgency instinct makes us want to take immediate action in the face of a perceived imminent danger. It must have served us humans well in the distant past. If we thought there might be a lion in the grass, it wasn’t sensible to do too much analysis. Those who stopped and carefully analyzed the probabilities are not our ancestors. We are the offspring of those who decided and acted quickly with insufficient information. Today, we still need the urgency instinct—for example, when a car comes out of nowhere and we need to take evasive action. But now that we have eliminated most immediate
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The urgency instinct
When you are called to action, sometimes the most useful action you can take is to improve the data.
When a problem seems urgent the first thing to do is not to cry wolf, but to organize the data.
Really interesting regarding our current situation
The five that concern me most are the risks of global pandemic, financial collapse, world war, climate change, and extreme poverty.
And we need the World Health Organization to remain healthy and strong to coordinate a global response.
wolf. I don’t tell you not to worry. I tell you to worry about the right things. I don’t tell you to look away from the news or to ignore the activists’ calls to action. I tell you to ignore the noise, but keep an eye on the big global risks. I don’t tell you not to be afraid. I tell you to stay coolheaded and support the global collaborations we need to reduce these risks. Control your urgency instinct. Control all your dramatic instincts. Be less stressed by the imaginary problems of an overdramatic world, and more alert to the real problems and how to solve them.
Her dramatic talent was amazing. But she didn’t use it to distort the facts. She used it to explain them.
We should be teaching them how to hold the two ideas at the same time: that bad things are going on in the world, but that many things are getting better.
Most important of all, we should be teaching our children humility and curiosity.
Being humble, here, means being aware of how difficult your instincts can make it to get the facts right. It means being realistic about the extent of your knowledge. It means being happy to say “I don’t know.” It also means, when you do have an opinion, being prepared to change it when you discover new facts. It is quite relaxing being humble, because it means you can stop feeling pressured to have a view about everything, and stop feeling you must be ready to defend your views all the time.
It means letting your mistakes trigger curiosity instead of embarrassment.
What you learn about the world at school will become outdated within 10 or 20 years of graduating. So we must find ways to update adults’ knowledge too.
Let’s show children Dollar Street instead, and show them how regular people live. If you are a teacher, send your class “traveling” on dollarstreet.org and ask them to find differences within countries and similarities across countries.
and to realize that the news is not very useful for understanding the world.
a fact-based worldview is more comfortable. It creates less stress and hopelessness than the dramatic worldview, simply because the dramatic one is so negative and terrifying.
Two thoughts at the same time: concerned and full of joy.
