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.

Only actively wrong “knowledge” can make us score so badly.

the overdramatic worldview is so difficult to shift because it comes from the very way our brains work.

But we need to learn to control our drama intake. 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.

This chapter is about the first of our ten dramatic instincts, the gap instinct. I’m talking about that irresistible temptation we have to divide all kinds of things into two distinct and often conflicting groups, with an imagined gap—a huge chasm of injustice—in between. It is about how the gap instinct creates a picture in people’s heads of a world split into two kinds of countries or two kinds of people: rich versus poor.

Afterward, people ask me, “So what should we call them instead?” But listen carefully. It’s the same misconception: we and them. What should “we” call “them” instead?

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.

Let’s call them comparisons of averages, comparisons of extremes, and the view from up here.

And in a sense this is true. It is what the numbers say. But in what sense? To what extent? Are all men better than all women? Are all US citizens richer than all Mexicans?

We almost always get a more accurate picture by digging a little deeper and looking not just at the averages but at the spread: not just the group all bundled together, but the individuals.

The media support that impression with images of the very richest—often not the richest 10 percent but probably the richest 0.1 percent, the ultra-rich—and their boats, horses, and huge mansions.

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.

To control the gap instinct, look for the majority.

Beware comparisons of averages. If you could check the spreads you would probably find they overlap. There is probably no gap at all.

Beware comparisons of extremes. In all groups, of countries or people, there are some at the top and some at the bottom. The difference is sometimes extremely unfair. But even then the majority is usually somewhere in between, right where the gap is supposed to be. • The view from up here. Remember, looking down from above distorts the view. Everything else looks equally short, but it’s not.

(By the way, that is a good general principle with statistics: be careful jumping to any conclusions if the differences are smaller than say, roughly, 10 percent.)

the misremembering of the past; selective reporting by journalists and activists; and the feeling that as long as things are bad it’s heartless to say they are getting better.

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.

When women are educated, all kinds of wonderful things happen in societies.

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 between bad and improving? Definitely not. It’s both. It’s both bad and better. Better, and bad, at the same time.

When you hear about something terrible, calm yourself by asking, If there had been an equally large positive improvement, would I have heard about that? Even if there had been hundreds of larger improvements, would I have heard?

Keep in mind that the positive changes may be more common, but they don’t find you. You need to find them. (And if you look in the statistics, they are everywhere.)

keep track of every death and its cause, write them down, and then add them up. That’s extremely time-consuming. There’s only one such data set in the whole world. It’s named the Global Burden of Disease,

My survival and success in life have always depended on others. Thanks to my family, free education, and free health care, I made it all the way from that ditch to the World Economic Forum. I would never have made it on my own.

control the negativity instinct, expect bad news.

Practice distinguishing between a level (e.g., bad) and a direction of change (e.g., better).

We have now arrived at the third instinct—the straight line instinct—and the third and last mega misconception: the false idea that the world population is just increasing. Please pay attention to the word just, which I’ve made italic and underlined for a purpose. This word is the misconception.

When looking at a stone flying toward you, you can often predict whether it is going to hit you. You need no numbers, no graphs, no spreadsheets. Your eyes and brain extend the trajectory and you move out of the stone’s way. It’s easy to imagine how this automatic visual forecasting skill helped our ancestors survive.

Mino just continues growing, he will be 60 inches tall on his third birthday—a five-foot toddler.

But when we’re less familiar with a topic, it’s surprisingly difficult to imagine how stupid such an assumption may be.

When people hear that the population is growing, they intuitively think it will continue to grow unless something is done. They intuitively visualize the trend continuing into the future. But remember, for my grandchild Mino to stop growing taller, nothing drastic needs to be done.

to survive. But if you drink six liters at once,

Actually, everything you need to survive is lethal in high dosage.

Any two connected points look like a straight line but when we have three points we can distinguish between a straight line (1, 2, 3) and the start of what may be a doubling line (1, 2, 4).

Factfulness is … recognizing the assumption that a line will just continue straight, and remembering that such lines are rare in reality.

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.

kind of information we seem most likely to process is stories: information that sounds dramatic.

we are not extremely careful, we come to believe that the unusual is usual: that this is what the world looks like.

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.

Improvements in regulations have been driven not by death rates but by fear, and in some cases—Fukushima, DDT—fear of an invisible substance has run amok and is doing more harm than the substance is itself.

turned out Wikipedia unintentionally presented a very distorted worldview. It was distorted in a systematic way according to a Western mind-set.

Fear can be useful, but only if it is directed at the right things.

Because “frightening” and “dangerous” are two different things. Something frightening poses a perceived risk. Something dangerous poses a real risk.

Factfulness is … recognizing when frightening things get our attention,

When you are afraid, you see the world differently. Make as few decisions as possible until the panic has subsided.

This is the cruel calculus of extreme poverty. It felt almost inhuman to look away from an individual dying child in front of me and toward hundreds of anonymous dying children I could not see.

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