Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About The World - And Why Things Are Better Than You Think

by Hans Rosling

Great knowledge can interfere with an expert’s ability to see what actually works. All these solutions are great for solving some problem, but none of them will solve all problems. 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. And of course some of the most valued and important aspects of human development cannot be measured in numbers at all. We can estimate suffering from disease using numbers. We can measure improvements in material living conditions using numbers. But the end goal of economic growth is individual freedom and culture, and these values are difficult to capture with numbers. The idea of measuring human progress in numbers seems completely bizarre to many people. I often agree. The numbers will never tell the full story of what life on Earth is all about. The world cannot be understood without numbers. But the world cannot be understood with numbers alone.

“We are not the healthiest of the poor, we are the poorest of the healthy.”

Just as Cuba is the poorest of the healthy because of its commitment to a single idea, the United States is the sickest of the rich.

The United States spends more than twice as much per capita on health care as other capitalist countries on Level 4—around $9,400 compared to around $3,600—and for that money its citizens can expect lives that are three years shorter. The United States spends more per capita on health care than any other country in the world, but 39 countries have longer life expectancies.

Under the current US system, rich, insured patients visit doctors more than they need, running up costs, while poor patients cannot afford even simple, inexpensive treatments and die younger than they should. Doctors spend time that could be used to save lives or treat illness providing unnecessary, meaningless care. What a tragic waste of physician time.

As with most discussions about the private versus the public sector, the answer is not either/or. It is case-by-case, and it is both. The challenge is to find the right balance between regulation and freedom.

Even Democracy Is Not the Single Solution This is risky, but I am going to argue it anyway. I strongly believe that liberal democracy is the best way to run a country. People like me, who believe this, are often tempted to argue that democracy leads to, or is even a requirement for, other good things, like peace, social progress, health improvements, and economic growth. But here’s the thing, and it is hard to accept: the evidence does not support this stance. Most countries that make great economic and social progress are not democracies. South Korea moved from Level 1 to Level 3 faster than any country had ever done (without finding oil), all the time as a military dictatorship. Of the ten countries with the fastest economic growth in 2016, nine of them score low on democracy. 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. There is no single measure—not GDP per capita, not child mortality (as in Cuba), not individual freedom (as in the United States), not even democracy—whose improvement will guarantee improvements in all the others. There is no single indicator through which we can measure the progress of a nation. Reality is just more complicated than that. The world cannot be understood without numbers, nor through numbers alone. A country cannot function without a governme...

Factfulness is … recognizing that a single perspective can limit your imagination, and remembering that it is better to look at problems from many angles to get a more accurate understanding and find practical solutions. To control the single perspective instinct, get a toolbox, not a hammer. • Test your ideas. Don’t only collect examples that show how excellent your favorite ideas are. Have people who disagree with you test your ideas and find their weaknesses. • Limited expertise. Don’t claim expertise beyond your field: be humble about what you don’t know. Be aware too of the limits of the expertise of others. • Hammers and nails. If you are good with a tool, you may want to use it too often. If you have analyzed a problem in depth, you can end up exaggerating the importance of that problem or of your solution. Remember that no one tool is good for everything. If your favorite idea is a hammer, look for colleagues with screwdrivers, wrenches, and tape measures. Be open to ideas from other fields. • Numbers, but not only numbers. The world cannot be understood without numbers, and it cannot be understood with numbers alone. Love numbers for what they tell you about real lives. • Beware of simple ideas and simple solutions. History is full of visionaries who used simple utopian visions to justify terrible actions. Welcome complexity. Combine ideas. Compromise. Solve problems on a case-by-case basis.

Our European governments claim to be honoring the Geneva Convention that entitles a refugee from a severely war-torn country to apply for and receive asylum. But their immigration policies make a mockery of this claim in practice and directly create the transport market in which the smugglers operate.

Unless you are willing to forgo all these things and start hand-washing your jeans and your bedsheets, why should you expect them to? Instead of finding someone to blame and expecting them to take responsibility, what we need in order to save the planet from the huge risks of climate change is a realistic plan. We must put our efforts into inventing new technologies that will enable 11 billion people to live the life that we should expect all of them to strive for. The life we are living now on Level 4, but with smarter solutions.

Factfulness is … recognizing when a scapegoat is being used and remembering that blaming an individual often steals the focus from other possible explanations and blocks our ability to prevent similar problems in the future. To control the blame instinct, resist finding a scapegoat. • Look for causes, not villains. When something goes wrong don’t look for an individual or a group to blame. Accept that bad things can happen without anyone intending them to. Instead spend your energy on understanding the multiple interacting causes, or system, that created the situation. • Look for systems, not heroes. When someone claims to have caused something good, ask whether the outcome might have happened anyway, even if that individual had done nothing. Give the system some credit.

When we are afraid and under time pressure and thinking of worst-case scenarios, we tend to make really stupid decisions. Our ability to think analytically can be overwhelmed by an urge to make quick decisions and take immediate action.

We do not seem to have a similar instinct to act when faced with risks that are far off in the future. In fact, in the face of future risks, we can be pretty slothful. That is why so few people save enough for their retirement.

Fear plus urgency make for stupid, drastic decisions with unpredictable side effects. Climate change is too important for that. It needs systematic analysis, thought-through decisions, incremental actions, and careful evaluation.

Anyone emitting lots of greenhouse gas must stop doing that as soon as possible. We know who that is: the people on Level 4 who have by far the highest levels of CO2 emissions, so let’s get on with it. And let’s make sure we have a serious data set for this serious problem so that we can track our progress.

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.

Factfulness is … recognizing when a decision feels urgent and remembering that it rarely is. To control the urgency instinct, take small steps. • Take a breath. When your urgency instinct is triggered, your other instincts kick in and your analysis shuts down. Ask for more time and more information. It’s rarely now or never and it’s rarely either/or. • Insist on the data. If something is urgent and important, it should be measured. Beware of data that is relevant but inaccurate, or accurate but irrelevant. Only relevant and accurate data is useful. • Beware of fortune-tellers. Any prediction about the future is uncertain. Be wary of predictions that fail to acknowledge that. Insist on a full range of scenarios, never just the best or worst case. Ask how often such predictions have been right before. • Be wary of drastic action. Ask what the side effects will be. Ask how the idea has been tested. Step-by-step practical improvements, and evaluation of their impact, are less dramatic but usually more effective.

We should be teaching our children the basic up-to-date, fact-based framework—life on the four levels and in the four regions—and training them to use Factfulness rules of thumb—the bullet points from the end of each chapter. This would enable them to put the news from around the world in context and spot when the media, activists, or salespeople are triggering their dramatic instincts with overdramatic stories. These skills are part of the critical thinking that is already taught in many schools. They would protect the next generation from a lot of ignorance. • We should be teaching our children that there are countries on all different levels of health and income and that most are in the middle. • We should be teaching them about their own country’s socioeconomic position in relation to the rest of the world, and how that is changing. • We should be teaching them how their own country progressed through the income levels to get to where it is now, and how to use that knowledge to understand what life is like in other countries today. • We should be teaching them that people are moving up the income levels and most things are improving for them. • We should be teaching them what life was really like in the past so that they do not mistakenly think that no progress has been made. • 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. • We should be teaching them that cultu...

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.

Being curious means being open to new information and actively seeking it out. It means embracing facts that don’t fit your worldview and trying to understand their implications. It means letting your mistakes trigger curiosity instead of embarrassment. “How on earth could I be so wrong about that fact? What can I learn from that mistake? Those people are not stupid, so why are they using that solution...

Most Western employees in large multinationals and financial institutions are still trying to operate according to a deeply rooted, outdated, and distorted worldview.

Instead it is up to us as consumers to learn how to consume the news more factfully, and to realize that the news is not very useful for understanding the world.

First: a fact-based worldview is more useful for navigating life,

Second, and probably more important: 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.

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 hav...