Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About The World - And Why Things Are Better Than You Think
How is it possible that the majority of people score worse than chimpanzees? Worse than random! This is because of a massive ignorance.
How could policy makers and politicians solve global problems if they were operating on the wrong facts?
How could business people make sensible decisions for their organization if their worldview were upside down?
And how could each person going about their life know which issues they should be stressed and worried about?
Why was this ignorance about the world so widespread and so persistent?
We are all wrong sometimes, but how could so many people be wrong about so much?
Why were so many people scoring worse than the chimps?
Gradually, we came to realize that there was something more going on. The ignorance we kept on finding was not just an upgrade problem. It couldn't fixed simply by providing clearer data animations or better teaching tools. People might indeed be inspired with teachings, momentarily, but after lecture, they were still stuck in their old negative worldview. The new ideas just wouldn't take. People are still expressing beliefs about poverty or population growth that it had just proven wrong with the facts. Why was the dramatic worldview so persistent? Could the media be to blame? Sure, the media plays a role, but we must not make them into a pantomime villain.
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. It is called the overdramatic worldview. It's stressful and misleading.
In fact, the vast majority of the world's population lives somewhere in the middle of the income scale. Perhaps they are not what we think of as middle class, but they are not living in extreme poverty. Their girls go to school, their children get vaccinated, they live in two-child families, and they want to go abroad on holiday, not as refugees. Step-by-step, year-by-year, the world is improving. Not every single measure every single year, but as a rule. Though the world faces huge challengees, we have made tremendous progress. This is the fact-based worldview.
It is the overdramatic worldview that draws people to the most dramatic and negative answers to my fact questions. People constantly and intuitively refer to their worldview when thinking, guessing, or learning about the world. So if your worldview is wrong, then you will systematically make wrong guesses. But this overdramatic worldview is not caused simply by out-of-date knowledge, as one once thought. Even people with access to the latest information get the world wrong. But it is not merely the fault of an evil-minded media, propaganda, fake news or wrong facts.
The overdramatic worldview is so difficult to shift because it comes from the very way our brains work. The human brain is a product of millions of years of evolution, and we are hard-wired with instincts that helped our ancestors to survive in small groups of hunters and gatherers. 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 live-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. Our cravings for sugar and fat make obesity one of the largest health problems in the world today. In the same way, our quick-thinking brains and cravings for drama are causing misconceptions and overdramatic worldview.
We still need these dramatic instincts to given meaning to our world and get us through the day. If we shifted every input and analyzed every decision rationally, a normal life would be impossible. We should not cut out all sugar and fat, and we should not ask a surgeon to remove the parts of our brain that deal with emotions. 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.
It is data as therapy. It is understanding as a source of mental peace. Because the world is not as dramatic as it seems. Factfulness, like a healthy diet and regular exercise, can and should become part of your daily life. Start to practice it, and you will be able to replace your overdramatic worldview with a worldview based on facts. You will be able to get the world right without learning it by heart. You will make better decisions, stay alert to real dangers and possibilities, and avoid being constantly stressed about the wrong things. You will be able to shift your misconceptions, develop a fact-based worldview, and beat the chimps every time. You will be able to change your world view: if you are ready for critical thinking to replace instinctive reaction; and if you are feeling humble, curious, and ready to be amazed.
1. The Gap Instinct
This is about 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. This is mega misconceptions by dividing the world into two misleading boxes -- poor and rich -- it completely distorts all the global proportions in poeple's minds.
The world has completely changed. Today, families are small and child deaths are rare in the vast majority of countries, including the largest: China and India. The complete world makeover is not unique to family size and child survival rates. The change looks very similar for pretty much any aspect of human lives: income, tourism, democracy, or access to education, health care, or electricity. The world used to be divided into two but isn't any longer. Today, most people are in the middle. There is no gap between the West and the rest, between developed and developing, between rich and poor. We should all stop using the simple pairs of categories.
To summarize: low-income countries are much more developed than most people think, and vastly fewere poeple live in them. The idea of a divided world with a majority stuck in misery and deprivation is an illusion. A complete misconception. Simply wrong.
The majority of people live neither in low-income countries nor in high-income countries, but in middle-income countries. Combining middle-and high-income countries, that makes 91 percent of humanity, most of whom have integrated into the global market and made great progress toward decent lives. This is a happy realization for humanitarians and a crucial realization for global businesses. There are 5 billion potential consumers out there, improving their lives in the middle, and wanting to consume shampoo, motorcycles, menstrual pads, and smartphones. You can easily miss them if you go around thinking they are "poor".
So what should "we" call "them" instead? In four income levels.
Level 1 : below $2 --> represented by 1 billion people
Level 2: between $2 to $8 --> represented by 3 billions people
Level 3: between $8 to $32 --> represented by 2 billions people
Level 4: above $32 --> represented by 1 billion people
The four income levels are the first, most important part of your new fact-based framework.
Think of the four income levels as the levels of a computer game. Everyone wants to move from Level 1 to Level 2 and upward through the levels from there. Only, it's a very strange computer game, because Level 1 is the hardest.
Level 1. The Extreme Poverty: roughly 1 billion people live like this today.
You start with $1 per day. Your five children have to spend hours walking barefoot with you rsingle plastic bucket, back and forth, to fetch water from a dirty mud hole an hour's walk away. On their way home they gather firewood and prepare the same gray porridge that you've been eating every meal, every day, for your whole life -- except during the months when the meager soil yielded no crops and you went to bed hungry. One day your youngest daughter develops as nasty cough. Smoke from the indoor fire is weakening her lungs. You can't afford antibiotics, and one month later she is dead. If you are lucky and the yields are good, you can sell some surplus crops and manage to earn more than $2 a day, which would move you to the next level.
Level 2: roughly 3 billions people live like this today.
Now you've quadrupled your income and earn $4 a day. You can buy food that you didn't grow yourself, and you can afford chickens, which means eggs. You save some money and buy sandals for your children, and a bike, and more plastic buckets. It takes you only half an hour to fetch water for the day. You by a gas stove so your children can attend school instead of gathering wood. When there's power they do their homework under a bulb. But the electricity is too unstable for a freezer. You save up for mattresses so you don't have to sleep on the mud floor. Life is much better now, but still very uncertain. A single illness and you would have to sell most of your possessions to buy medicine (that would throw you back to Level 1 again). Another three dollars a day would be good, but to experience really drastic improvement you need to quadruple again. If you can land a job in the local garment industry you will be the first member of your family to bring home a salary.
Level 3: roughly 2 billions people live like this today.
You work multiple jobs: 16 hours a day, seven days a week, and manage to quadruple your income again, to $16 a day. Your savings are impressive and you install a cold-water tap. No more fetching water. With a stable electric line the kids' homework improves and you can buy a fridge that lets you store food and serve different dishes each day. You save to by a motorcycle, which means you can travel to a better-paying job at factory in town. Unfortunately, you crash on your way there one day and you have to use money you had saved for your children's education to pay the medical bills. You recover, and thanks to your savings you are not thrown back a level. Two of your children start high school. If they manage to finish, they will be able to get better-paying jobs than you have ever had. To celebrate, you take the whole family on its first-ever vacation, one afternoon to the beach, just for fun.
Level 4: roughly 1 billion people live like this today.
You have more than $32 a day. You are a rich consumer and three more dollars a day makes very little different to your every day life. That's why you think three dollars, which can change the life of someone living in extreme poverty, is not a lot of money. You have more than twelve years of education and you have been on an airplane on vacation. You can eat out once a month and you can buy a car. Of course you have hot and cold water indoors.
How to control the Gap Instinct
There are three common warning signs that someone might be telling you an overdramatic gap story and triggering your gap instinct: comparisons of averages, comparisons of extremes, and the view from up here.
Comparisons of averages are a quick way to convey information. But any simplification of information may also be misleading. Averages mislead by hiding a spread (a range of different numbers) in a single number. When we compare two averages, we risk misleading ourselves even more by focusing on the gap between those two single numbers, and missing the overlapping spreads, the overlapping ranges of numbers, that make up each average. That is, we see gaps that are not really there. In most cases there is no clear separation of two groups, even if it seems like that from the averages. We almost always get a more accurate picture by digging a little deeper and not looking not just at the averages but at the spread: not just the group all bundled together, but the individuals. Then we often see that apparently distinct groups are in fact very much overlapping.
Comparisons of extremes are naturally drawn. We are thinking about global inequality we might think about the stories we have seen on the news about famine in South Sudan, on the one hand, and our own comfortable reality on the other. If we are asked to think about different kinds of government systems, we might quickly recall on the one hand corrupt, oppressive dictatorships and on the other hand countries like Sweden, with great welfare system and benevolent bureaucrats dedicating their lives to safeguarding the rights of all citizens. These stories of opposites are engaging and provocative and tempting -- and very effective for triggering our gap instinct -- but they rarely help understanding. There will always be the richest and the poorest, there will always be the worst regimes and the best. But the fact that extremes exist doesn't tell us much. The majority is usually to be found in the middle, and it tells a very different story.
Take Brazil, one of the world's most unequal countries. The richest 10 percent earns 41 percent of the total income. We quickly imagine an elite stealing resources from all the rest. The media support that impression with images of very riches -- often not the richest 10 percent but probably the richest 0.1 percent, the ultra rich -- and their boats, horses, and huge mansions. Yes, the number is disturbingly high, but at the same time, it hasn't been this low for many years.
The big hump is on Level 3. That's where you get a motorbike and reading glasses, and save money in a bank to pay for high school and someday buy a washing machine. In reality, even in one of the world's most unequal countries, there is no gap. Most people are in the middle.
The view from up here. Even you live in a middle-income country (with the average income is on Level 2 or 3 --- like Mexico), you probably live on level 4 and your life is similar to the lives of the people living on Level 4 in San Francisco, Stockholm, Rio, Cape Town, and Beijing. The thing known as poverty in your country is different from "extreme poverty". It's "relative poverty". In the U.S., people are classified as below the poverty line even if they live on Level 3.
So the struggles people go through on Levels 1, 2, and 3 will most likely be completely unfamiliar to you, and they are not described in any helpful way in the mass media you consume. 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.
When you live on Level 4, everyone on Level 3, 2, and 1 can look equally poor, and the word poor can lose any specific meaning. Even a person on Level 4 can appear poor: maybe the paint on their walls is peeling, or maybe they are driving a used car. Anyone who has looked down from the top of a tall building knows that it is difficult to assess from there the differences in height of the buildings nearer the ground. They all look kind of small. In the same way, it is natural for people living on Level 4 to see the world as divided into just two categories: rich (at the top of the building, like you) and poor (down there, not like you). It is natural to look down and say "oh, they are all poor." It is natural to miss the distinctions between the people with cars, the people with motorbikes and bicycles, the people with sandals, and the people with no shoes at all.
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 thte 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.
Beware the view from up here. Remember, looking down from above distorts the view. Everything else looks equally short, but it's not.
2. The Negativity Instinct
The mega misconception that "the world is getting worse" is about negativity instinct: our tendency to notice the bad more than the good. The majority of people think the world is getting worse. No wonder we all feel so stressed. It is easy to be aware of all the bad things happening in the word. It's harder to know about the good things: billions of improvements that are never reported. The basic facts about the world's progress are so little known. As long as people have a worldview that is so much more negative than reality, pure statistics can make them feel more positive. It is statistics as therapy.
Today almost everybody has escaped hell. The original source of all human suffering is about to be eradicated. We should plan a big party, but instead, we are gloomy. On our Level 4 TVs, we still see people in extreme poverty and it seems that nothing has changed. Billions of people have escaped misery and become consumers and producers for the world market, billions of people have managed to slide up from level 1 to level 2 and 3, without the people on level 4 noticing.
Back in 1800, when Swedes starved to death and British children worked in coal mines,life expectancy was roughly 30 years everywhere in the world. Among all babies who were ever born, roughly half died during their childhood. Most of the other half died between the ages of 50 and 70. So the average was around 30. It's just an average, and with averages we must always remember that there's a spread.
The average life expectancy across the world today is 70. Actually it's better than that: it's 72. People live on average ten years longer now than 40 years ago. We humans have always struggled hard to make our families survive, and finally we are succeeding.
There's a dip in the global life expectancy curve in 1960 because 15 to 40 million people -- starved to death that year in China, in what was probably the world's largest ever man-made famine.
Sweden today is on Level 4 and one of the richest and healthiest countries in the world. But it hasn't always been so. The following World Health Chart with the bubble graph, each country is represnted by a bubble, with the size of the bubble showing the size of the country's population. Poorer countries are on the left and richer countries are on the right; healthier countries are higher up, and sicker countries are lower down. Notice that there are not two groups, the world is not divided into two.
1948 is a very important year. The author of this book was born, a second world war was over, Sweden topped the medals table at the Winter Olympics. The Sweden in 1948 was where Egypt is on the health-wealth map today. It was right in the middle of Level 3. Life conditions in 1950s Sweden were similar to those in Egypt or other countries on Level 3 today. There were still open sewage ditches and it wasn't uncommon for children to drown in bodies of water close to home. On level 3, parents work hard, away from their children, and the government has not yet enforced regulations to protect water with fences.
Sweden kept improving. During the 1950s and 1960s it progressed all the way from Egypt today to Malaysia today. By 1975, like Malaysia today, was just about to enter Level 4.
In 1921, Sweden was like Zambia now. That's Level 2.
In 1891, Sweden was like Lesotho is today, the country with the shortest life expectancy in the world today, right on the border between Level 1 and 2, almost in extreme poverty. The author's grandmother had-washed all the laundry of her family of nine all her adult life. But as she grew older, she witnessed the miracle of development as both she and Sweden reached Level 3. By the end of her life she had an indoor cold-water tap and a latrine bucket in the basement: luxury compared to her childhood, when there had been no running water. They could spell and count but none of them was literate enough to read for pleasure. They couldn't read children's books nor could they write a letter. None of them had had more than four years of school. Sweden in my grandparents' generation had the same level of literacy that India, also on Level 2, has achieved today.
The author's great-grandmother was born in 1863, when Sweden's average income level was like today's Afghanistan, right on Level 1, with a majority of the population living in extreme poverty. Great-grandmother didn't forget to tell her daughter, my grandmother, how cold the mud floor used to be in the winter. But today people in Afghanistan and other countries on Level 1 live much longer lives than Swedes did back in 1863. This is because basic modernizations have reached most people and improved their lives drastically. They have plastic bags to store and transport food. They have plastic buckets to carry water and soap to kill germs. Most of their children are vaccinated. On average they live 30 years longer than Swedes did in 1800, when Sweden was on Level 1. That is how much life even on level 1 has improved.
It is hard to see any of this global progress by looking out your window. It is taking place beyond the horizon. But there are some clues you can tune into, if you pay close attention. Listen carefully, can you hear a child practicing the guitar or the piano? That child has not drowned, and is instead experiencing the joy and freedom of making music.The goal of higher income is not just bigger piles of money. The goal of longer lives is not just extra time. The ultimate goal is to have the freedom to do what we want.
In large part, it is because of our negativity instinct: our instinct to notice the bad more than the good.
There three things going on here:
the misremembering of the past;
selective reporting by journalists and activists;
the feeling that as long as things are bad it's heartless to say they are getting better.
Warning: objects in your memories were worse than they appear.
For centuries, older people have romanticized their youths and insisted that things ain't what they used to be. Most things used to be worse, not better. But it is extremely easy for humans to forget how things really did "used to be".
In Western Europe and North America, only the very olderst, who lived through the Second World War or the Great Depression, have any personal recollection of the sever deprivation and hunger of just a few decades ago. Yet even in China and India, where extreme poverty was the reality for the vast majority just a couple of generations ago, it is now mostly forgotten by people who live in decent houses, have clean clothes, and ride mopeds.
The Swedish author and journalist Lasse Berg wrote an excellent report from rural India in the 1970s. When he returned 25 years later, he could see clearly how living conditions had improved. Pictures from his visit in the 1970s showed earthen floors, clay walls, half-naked children, and the eyes of villagers with low self-esteem and little knowledge of the outside world. They were a stark contrast to the concrete houses of the late 1990s, where well-dressed children played and self-confident and curious villagers watched TV. When Lasse showed the villagers in the 1970s pictures they couldn't believe the photos were taken in their neighbourhood. "No", they said. "This can't be here. You must be mistaken. We have never been that poor." Like most people, they were living in the moment, busy with new problems, like the children watching immoral soap operas or not having enough money to buy a motorbike.
Beyond living memory, for some reason we avoid reminding ourselves and our children about the miseries and brutalities of the past. The truth is to be found in ancient graveyards and burial sites, where archeologists have to get used to discovering that a large proportion of all the remains they dig up are those of children. Most will have been killed by starvation or disgusting diseases, but many child skeletons bear the marks of physical violence. Hunter-gatherer societies often had murder rates above 10 percent and children were not spared. In today's graveyards, child graves are rare.
Selective reporting. Stories about gradual improvements rarely make the front page even when they occur on a dramatic scale and impact millions of people. And thanks to increasing press freedom and improving technology, we hear more, about more disasters, than ever before. When Europeans slaughtered indigenous people across America a few centuries ago, it didn't make the news back in the old world. When central planning resulted in mass famine in rural China, millions starved to death while the youngsters in Europe waving communist red flags knew nothing about it. When in the past whole species or ecosystems were destroyed, no one realized or even cared. Alongside all the other improvements, our surveillance of suffering has improved tremendously. This improved reporting is itself a sign of human progress, but it crates the impression of the exact opposite. At the same time, activists and lobbyists skillfully manage to make every dip in a trend appear to be the end of the world, even if the general trend is clearly improving, scaring us with alarmist exaggerations and prophecies. The news constantly alerts us to bad events in the present. The doom-laden feeling that this creates in us is then intensified by our inability to remember the past; our historical knowledge is rosy and pink and we fail to remember that, one year ago, or ten years ago, or 50 years ago, there was the same number of terrible events, probably more. This illusion of deterioration creates great stress for some people and makes other people lose hope. For no good reason.
Feeling. Not Thinking.
What are people really thinking when they say the world is getting worse? They are not thinking, they are feeling. If you still feel uncomfortable agreeing that the world is getting better, that's because you know that huge problems still remain. But it is just as ridiculous, and just as stressful, to look away from the progress that has been made. It's not an optimist, but a possibilist. 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. When people wrongly believe that nothing is improving, they may conclude that nothing we have tried so far is working and lose confidence in measure that actually work. Such people who have lost all hope for humanity, or they may become radicals, supporting drastic measures that are counter-productive when in fact, the methods we are already using to improve our world are working just fine.
Educating girls have proven to be one of the world's best-ever ideas. When women are educated, all kinds of wonderful things happen in societies. The workforce becomes diversified and able to make better decisions and solve more problems. Educated mothers decide to have fewer children and more children survive. More energy and time is invested in each child's education. It's a virtuous cycle of change.
How to control the negativity instinct?
The solution is not to balance out all the negative news with more positive news. That would just risk creating a self-deceiving, comforting, misleading bias in the other direction. it would be as helpful as balancing too much sugar with too much salt. It would make things more exciting, but maybe even less healthy. A solution is to persuade myself to keep two thoughts in my head at the same time. It seems that when we hear someone say things are getting better, we think they are also saying "don't worry, realx" or even "look away". But when I say things are getting better, I am not saying those things at all. I am certainly not advocating looking away from the terrible problems in the world. I am saying that things can be both bad and better. Does saying "things are improving" imply that everything is fine, and we should all relax and not worry? Not at all. Is it helpful to have to choose between bad and improving? Definitely not. It's both bad and better, at the same time. That is how we must think about the current state of the world.
Something else that helps to control the negativity instinct is to constantly expect bad news. Remember that the media and activists rely on drama to grab your attention. Remember that negative stories are more dramatic than neutral or positive ones. Remember how simple it is to construct a story of crisis from a temporary dip pulled out of its context of a long-term improvement. Remember that we live in a connected and transparent world where reporting about suffering is better than it has ever been before. 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, they are everywhere in statistics.
Don't censor history. The evidence about the terrible past is scary, but it is a great resource. It can help us to appreciate what we have today and provide us with hope that future generations will, as previous generations did, get over the dips and continue the long-term trends toward peace, prosperity, and solutions to our global problems.
I would like to thank... SOCIETY
During the author's lifetime, Sweden moved from Level 3 to Level 4:
A treatment against tuberculosis was invented and my mother got well. She read books to me that she borrowed from the public library. For free. I became the first in my family to get more than six years of education, and I went to university for free. I got a doctor's degree for free. Of course nothing is free: the taxpayers paid. And then, at the age of 30, when I become a father of two and I discovered my first cancer, I was treated and cured by the world's best health-care system, for free. 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 World Economic Forum in Davos and tell the world's experts that they knew less about basic global trends than chimpanzees. I would never have made it on my own.
Today, now that Sweden is on Level 4, only three children in 1,000 die before the age of five, and only 1 percent of those deaths are drownings. Fences, day care, life-jacket campaigns, swimming lessons, and lifeguards at public pools all cost money. Child death from drowning is one of the many horrors that has nearly disappeared as the country has become richer. That is what I call progress. the same improvements are taking place across the world today. Most countries are currently improving faster than Sweden ever did. Much faster.
Factfulness is... recognizing when we get negative news, and remembering that information about bad events is much more likely to reach us. When things are getting better we often don't hear about them. This gives us a systematically too-negative impression of the world around us, which is very stressful.
3. The Straight Line Instinct
The mega misconception that "the world population is just increasing and increasing".
Nowadays, the word sustainability is found in the title of almost every conference. One of the most important numbers of the sustainability equation is the human population. There must be some kind of limit to how many people can live on this planet. Right?
The straight line instinct: the false idea that the world population is just increasing.
In fact, the world population is increasing, very fast. Roughly a billion people will be added over the next 13 years. That's true. But it's not just increasing. The 'just' implies that, if nothing is done, the population will just keep on growing. it implies that some drastic action is needed in order to stop the growth. That is the misconception, it is based on the same instinct that stopped me and the world from acting sooner to stop Ebola. The instinct to assume that lines are straight.
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. And it still helps us survive: when driving a car, we constantly predict where other cars will be within the next few seconds.
But our straight line intuition is not always a reliable guide in modern life.
To understand the shape of population curve, we need to understand where the increase in population is coming from.
The experts are convinced the population will keep growing mainly because there will be more adults. Not more children and not more very old people. More adults. The UN experts are not predicting that the number of children will stop increasing. The are reporting that it is already happening. The radical change that is needed to stop rapid population growth is that the number of children stops growing. And that is already happening. Attention now!. It shows the incredible, truly world-changing drop in the number of babies per woman that has happened during my lifetime.
As billions of people left extreme poverty, most of them decided to have fewer children. They no longer needed large families for child labor on the small family farm. And they no longer needed extra children as insurance against child mortality. Women and men got educated and started to want better-educated and better-fed children: and having fewer of them was the obvious solution. In practice, that goal was easier to realize thanks to the wonderful blessing of modern contraceptives, which let parents have fewer children without having less sex.
The dramatic drop in babies per woman is expected to continue, as long as more people keep escaping extreme poverty, and more women get educated, and as access to contraceptives and sexual education keeps increasing. Nothing drastic is needed. Just more of what we are already doing. The exact speed of the future drop is not possible to predict exactly. It depends on how fast these changes continue to happen. But in any case, the annual number of births in the world has already stopped increasing, which means that the period of fast population growth will soon be over. We are now arriving at "peak child". But then, if the number of births has already stopped increasing, where are the 4 billion new adults going to come from?
The large increase in population is going to happen not because there are more children, and not because old folks are living longer. The large increase in population will happen mainly because the children who already exist today are going to grow up and 'fill up' the diagram with 3 billion more adults. This 'fill-up effect' takes three generations, and then it is done.
That's actually all you need to know to understand the method that the UN experts use to not just draw a straight line into the future. (This explanation is a brutal simplification. Many die before the reach 75, and many parents have their children after they reach 30. But even including these facts makes no difference to the big picture.)
When a population is not growing over a long period of time, and the population curve is flat, this must mean that each generation of new parents is the same size as the previous one. For thousands of years up to 1800 the population curve was almost flat. Have you heard people say that humans used to live in balance with nature? But let's avoid the rose-tinted glasses. Until 1800, women gave birth to six children on average. Instead, it stayed more or less stable. Remember the child skeletons in the graveyards of the past? On average four out of six children died before becoming parents themselves, leaving just two surviving children to parent the next generation. There was a balance. It wasn't because humans lived in balance with nature. Humans died in balance with nature. It was utterly brutal and tragic.
Today, humanity is once again reaching a balance. The number of parents is no longer increasing. But this balance is dramatically different from the old balance. The new balance is nice: the typical parents have two children, and neither of them dies. For the first time in human history, we live in balance.
In the mass media we sometimes see examples of very religious people, whether living in traditional ways or modern lives, who proudly show us their very large families as evidence of faith. Such documentary films, TV shows, and media reports give the impression that religion leads to much larger families. In reality, the connection between religion and babies per woman is not so impressive. For now, let's look at the single factor that does have a strong connection with large families: extreme poverty.
4. The Fear Instinct
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.
The attention filter. None of us has enough mental capacity to consume all the information out there. The question is, what part are we processing and how did it get selected? and what part are we ignoring? The kind of information we seem most likely to process is stories: information that sounds dramatic.
Imagine that we have a shield, or attention filter, between the world and our brain. This attention filter protects us against the noise of the world; without it, we would constantly be bombarded with so much information we would be overloaded and paralyzed. Then imagine that the attention filter has ten instinct-shaped holes in it -- gap, negativity, straight line, and so on. Most information doesn't get through, but the holes do allow through information that appeals to our dramatic instincts. So we end up paying attention to information that fits our dramatic instincts, and ignoring information that does not.
The media can't waste time on stories that won't pass our attention filters. There are unusual events which 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.
For the first time in world history, data exists for almost every aspect of global development. And yet, because of our dramatic instincts and the way the media must tap into them to grab our attention, we continue to have an overdramatic worldview. Of all our dramatic instincts, it seems to be the fear instincts that most strongly influences what information gets selected by news producers and presented to us consumers.
When people are asked what they are most afraid of, four answers always tend to trun up near the top: snakes, spiders, heights, and being trapped in small spaces. Then comes a long list with no surprises: public speaking, needles, airplanes, mice, strangers, dogs, crowds, blood, darkness, fire, drowning, and so on.
These fears are hardwired deep in our brains for obvious evolutionary reason. Fears of physical harm, captivity and poison once helped our ancestors survive. In modern times, perceptions of these dangers still trigger our fear instinct.
These fears are still constructive for people on Levels 1 and 2. Sixty thousand people are killed by snakes every year in these level. there's no hospital nearby and if there is you can't afford it.
On Levels 3 and 4, where life is less physically demanding and people can afford to protect themselves against nature, these biological memories probably cause more harm than good.
On Level 4, for sure that fears that evolved to protect us are now doing us harm. A small minority -- 3 percent -- of the population on Level 4 suffers from a phobia so strong it hinders their daily life. For the vast majority of us not blocked by phobias, the fear instinct harms us by distorting our worldview.
The media cannot resist tapping into our fear instinct. It's such an easy way to grab our attention. Fears that once helped keep our ancestors alive, today help keep journalists employed. It isn't the journalists' fault and we shouldn't expect them to change. It isn't driven by "media logic" among the producers so much as by "attention logic" in the heads of the consumers. If we look at the facts behind the headlines, we can see how the fear instinct systematically distorts what we see of the world.
While terrorism has been increasing worldwide, it has actually been decreasing on Level 4. But dramatic terrorist incidents in countries on Level 4 receive widespread media coverage that is denied to most victims of alcohol. And the very visible security controls at airports, which make the risk lower than ever, might give an impression if increased danger.
Fear vs. Danger: Being Afraid of the Right Things
Fear can be useful, but only if it is directed at the right things. Because "frightening" and dangerour" 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 seafloor 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.
Factfulness is recognizing when frightening things get our attention, and remembering that these are not necessarily the most risky. Our natural fears of violence, captivity and contamination make us systematically overestimate these risks.
To control the fear instinct, calculate the risks.
The scary world: fear vs. reality. 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.
Risk = danger x exposure. The risk something poses to you depends not on how scared it makes you feel, but on a combination of two things. How dangerous is it? And how much are you exposed to it?
Get calm before you carry on. When you are afraid, you see the world differently. Make a few decisions as possible until the panic has subsided.
5. The Size Instinct
Paying too much attention to the individual visible victim rather than to the numbers can lead us to spend all our resources on a fraction of the problem, and therefore save many fewer lives. This principle applies anywhere we are priortizing scarce resources. It is hard for people to talk about resources when it comes to saving lives, or prolonging or improving them. Doing so is often taken for heartlessness. Yet so long as reources are not infinite -- and they never are infinite -- it is the most compassionate thing to do to use your brain and work out how to do the most good with what you have. Just as I have urged you to look behind the statistics at the individual stories, I also urge you to look behind the individual stories at the statistics. The world cannot be understood without numbers. And it cannot be understood with numbers alone.
You tend to get things out of proportion. Getting things out of proportion, or misjudging the size of things, is something that we humans do naturally. It is instinctive to look at a lonely number and misjudge its importance. It is also instinctive to misjudge the importance of a single instance or an identifiable victim. These two tendencies are the two key aspects of the size instinct.
The media is this instinct's friend. It is pretty much a journalist's professional duty to make any given event, fact, or number sound more important than it is. And journalists now that it feels almost inhuman to look away from an individual in pain.
The two aspects of the size instinct, together with the negativity instinct, make us systematically underestimate the progress that has been made in the world. At the same time, we systematically overestimate other proportions. The proportion of immigrants in our countries. The proportion of people opposed to homosexuality. In each of these cases, at least in the U.S. and Europe, our interpretations are more dramatic than the reality.
How to control the size instinct? Compare the numbers.If you are offered one number, always ask for at least one more. Something to compare it with. Be especially careful about big numbers. It is a strange thing, but numbers over a certain size, when they are not compared with anything else, always look big. And how can something big not be important?
That is all there is to the 80/20 rule. We tend to assume that all items on a list are equally important, but usually just a few of them are more important than all the others put together. Whether it is causes of death or items in a budget. Simply focus first on understanding those that make up 80 percent of the total. Before spending time on the smaller once, ask yourself: where are the 80 percent? Why are these so big? What are the implications?
The PIN code of the world.
We can understand the world better, and make better decisions about it, if we know where the biggest proportion of the population lives now and where it will live in the future. Where is the world market? Where are the internet users? Where will tourists come from in the future? Where are most of the cargo ships going? and so on.
If the UN forecasts for population growth are correct, and if incomes in Asia and Africa keep growing as now, then the center gravity of the world market will shift over the next 20 years from Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. Today, the people living in rich countries around the North Atlantic, who represent 11 percent of the world population make up 60 percent of the Level 4 consumer market. Already by 2027, if incomes keep growing worldwide, as they are doing now, then that figure will have shrunk to 50 percent.
By 2040, 60 percent of Level 4 consumers will live outside the West. Yes, the Western domination of the world economy will soon be over. People of North America and Europe need to understand that most of the world population lives in Asia. In terms of economic muscles "we" are becoming the 20 percent, not the 80 percent. But many of "us" can't fit these numbers into our nostalgic minds. Not only do we misjudge how big our war monuments should be in Vietnam, we also misjudge our importance in the future global marketplace. Many of us forget to behave properly with those who will control the future trade deals.
Factfulness is.. recognizing when a lonely number seems impressive (small or large).
To control the size instinct, get things in proportion.
Compare. Always look for comparisons. Ideally, divide by something.
80/20. Look for the few largest items and deal with those first. They are quite likely more important than all the others put together.
Divide. Amounts and rates can tell very different stories. Rates are more meaningful, especially when comparing between different-sized groups. In particular, look for rates per person when comparing between countries or regions.
6. The Generalization Instinct
Everyone automatically categorizes and generalizes all the time, unconsciously. It is not a question of being prejudiced or enlightened. Categories are absolutely necessary for us to function. They give structure to our thoughts. Imagine if we saw every item and every scenario as truly unique -- we would not even have a language to describe the world around us. The necessary and useful instinct to generalize can also distort our worldview. It can make us mistakenly group together things, or people, or countries that are actually very different. It can make us assume everything or everyone in one category is similar. It can make us jump to conclusions about a whole category based on a few, or even just one, unusual example.
Once again, the media is the instinct's friend. Misleading generalizations and stereotypes act as a kind of shorthand for the media, providing quick and easy ways to communicate. Here are just a few examples from today's newspaper: rural life, middle class, super mom, gang member.
When many people become aware of a problematic generalization it is called a stereotype. Most commonly, people talk about race and gender stereotyping. These cause many very important problems, but they are not the only problems caused by wrong generalization.
Wrong generalization are mind-blockers for all kinds of understanding.
The gap instinct divides the world into "us" and "them", and the generalization instinct makes "us" think of "them" as all the same.
The majority of the world population is steadily moving up the levels. The number of people on Level 3 will increase from two billion to four billion between now and 2040. Almost everyone in the world is becoming a consumer. If you suffer from the misconception that most of the world is still too poor to buy anything at all, you risk missing out on the biggest economic opportunity in world history while you use your marketing spend to push special "yoga" pads to wealthy hipsters in the biggest cities in Europe.
Strategic business planners need a fact-based worldview to find their future customers.
The challenge is to realize which of our simple categories are misleading -- like "developed" and "developing" countries -- and replace them with better categories, like the four levels.
One of the best ways to do this is to travel, if you possibly can. When visiting reality in other countries, and not just the back-packer cafes, you realize that generalizing from what is normal in your home environment can be useless or even dangerous. If you can't travel, there are other ways to avoid using wrong categories.
Find better categories: Dollar Street.
Most people were just as uninterested in studying the data about global trends and proportions. And anyway, even looking at the data, it was pretty hard to understand what it meant for everyday life on different levels.
Imagine all the homes in the world lined up on one long street, sorted by income. The poorest live at the left end of the street and the richest live at the right end. Everybody else? Of course, you know it by now: most people live somewhere in the middle. Your house number on this street represents your income. Your neighbors on Dollar Street are people from all over the world with the same income as you.
Anna has sent photographers out to visit about 300 families in more than 50 countries, including: how people eat, sleep, brush their teeth and prepare food, what their homes are made, how they heat and light their homes, their everyday items like toilets and stoves, and in total more than 130 different aspects of their daily lives.
We could fill a whole book with images showing the striking similarities between the lives of people living on the same incomes in different countries, and the huge differences in how people live within countries. We have over 40,000 photos.
What the photos make clear is that the main factor that affects how people live is not their religion, their culture, or the country they live in, but their income.
Look for differences within groups and similarities across groups.
Country stereotypes simply fall apart when you look at the huge differences within countries and the equally huge similarities between countries on the same income level, independent of culture or religion. When someone says that an individual did something because they belong to some group -- a nation, a culture, a religion -- take care. Are there examples of different behavior in the same group? Or of the same behavior in other groups?
Beware of "The Majority"
Remember, that majority just means more than half. It could mean 51 percent. It could mean 99 percent. If possible, ask for the percentage.
Beware of Exceptional Examples.
If someone offers you a single example and wants to draw conclusions about a group, ask for more examples.
Assume you are not "normal" and other people are not "idiots.
Be cautious about generalizing from Level 4 experiences to the rest of the world. Especially if it leads you to the conclusion that other people are idiots.
Beware of generalizing from one group to another.
Factfulness is.. recognizing when a category is being used in an explanation, and remembering that categories can be misleading. To control generalization instinct, question your categories.
-- Look for differences within groups.
-- Look for similarities across groups.
-- Look for differences across groups.
-- Beware of the majority.
-- Beware of vivid examples.
-- Assume people are not idiots.
7. The Destiny Instinct
The destiny instinct is the idea that innate characteristics determine the destinies of people, countries, religions, or cultures. It's the idea that things are as they are for ineluctable, inescapable reasons: they have always been this way and will never change. This instinct makes us believe that our false generalization, or tempting gaps, are not only true, but fated: unchanging and unchangeable.
It is easy to see how this instinct would have served an evolutionary purpose. Historically, humans lived in surroundings that didn't change much. Learning how things worked and then assuming they would continue to work that way rather than constantly reevaluating was probably an excellent survival strategy.
It's also easy to understand how claiming a particular destiny for your group can come in useful in uniting that group around a supposedly never-changing purpose, and perhaps creating a sense of superiority over other groups. Such ideas must have been important for powering tribes, chiefdoms, nations and empires. But today, this instinct to see things as unchanging, this instinct not to update our knowledge, blinds us tot he revolutionary transformations in societies happening all around us.
Society and cultures are not like rocks, unchanging and unchangeable. They move. Western societies and cultures move, and non-Western societies and cultures move -- often much faster. It's jsut that all but the fastest cultural changes -- the spread of the internet, smartphones, and social media, for example -- tend to happen just a bit too slowly to be noticeable or newsworthy.
A common expression of the destiny instinct of the idea that the "Islamic world" fundamentally different from the "Christian world". This or that religion or continent or culture or nation will never change, because of its traditional and unchanging "values". At first sight there appears to be some analysis going on. On closer inspection, our instincts have often fooled us. These lofty statements are often simply feelings disguised as facts.
Cultures, nations, religions, and people are not rocks. They are in constant transformation.
Why does this matter? One reason is this: IMF forecasters' worldview had a strong influence on where your retirement funds were invested. Countries in Europe and North America were expected to experience fast and reliable growth, which made them attractive to investors. When these forecasts turned out to be wrong, and when these countries did not in fact grow fast, the retirement funds did not grow either. Supposedly low-risk/high-return countries turned out to be high-risk/low-return countries. And at the same time African countries with great growth potential were being starved of investment.
How many people in the West would guess that women in Iran today decide to have fewer babies than woman in either the U.S. or Sweden?
Almost every religious tradition has rules about sex, so it is easy to understand why so many people assume that women in some religions give birth to more children. But the link between religion and the number of babies per woman is often overstated. There is, though, a strong link between income and number of babies per woman.
A woman's right to an abortion is supported by just about every one in Sweden today. Strong support for women's rights in general has become part of our cultures. In 1960s
abortion in Sweden was still, except on very limited grounds, illegal. At the university we ran a secret fund to pay women to travel abroad to get safe abortions. These young pregnant students traveled to Poland. Five years later, Poland banned abortion and Sweden legalized it. The flow of young women started to go the other way. The point is, it was not always so. The cultures changed.
In South Korea and Japan, many wives are still expected to take care of their husband's parents, as well as taking full responsibility for the care of any children. I have encountered many men who are proud of these "Asian values" as they call them. I have had conversations with many women too, who see it differently. They find this culture unbearable and tell me these values make them less interested in getting married.
The macho values that are found today in many Asian and African countries, these are not Asian values or African values. They are not Muslim values. They are not Eastern values. They are patriarchal values like those found in Sweden only 60 years ago, and with social and economic progress they will vanish, just as they did in Sweden. They are not unchangeable.
Slow change is not no change.
Societies and cultures are in constant movement.
Be prepared to update your knowledge. Stay open to new data and keep freshening up your knowledge.
If you are tempted to claim that values are unchanging, try comparing your own with those your parents, or your grandparents, or your children, or your grandchildren. Try getting hold of public opinion polls for your country from 30 years ago. You will almost certainly see radical change.
People often tilt their heads and say "it's our culture" or "it's their culture" which gives the impression that it has always been that way and always will be. Then turn your head around and look for some countries examples.
8. The Single Perspective Instinct
Who can we trust? Forming your worldview by relying on the media would be like forming your view about me by looking only at a picture of my foot. Sure, my foot is part of me, but it's a pretty ugly part. I have better parts. My arms are unremarkable but quite fine, my face is OK. it isn't that the picture of my foot is deliberately lying about me. But it isn't showing you the whole of me.
Where, then, shall we get our information from if not from the media? Who can we trust? How about experts? People who devote their working lives to understanding their chosen slice of the world?
We find simple ideas very attractive. We enjoy that moment of insight, we enjoy feeling we really understand or know something. All problems have no a single cause, nor have a single solution.
The simple and beautiful idea of the free market can lead to the simplistic idea that all problems have a single cause -- government interference which we must always oppose; and that the solution to all problems is to liberate market forces by reducing taxes and removing regulations, which we must always support. Alternatively, the simple and beautiful idea of equality can lead to the simplistic idea that all problems are caused by inequality, which we should always oppose; and that the solution to all problem is redistribution of resources, which we should always support.
It saves a lot of time to think like this. You can have opinions and answers without having to learn about a problem from scratch and you can get on with using your brain for other tasks. But it's not so useful if you like to understand the world. Being always in favor of or always against any particular idea makes you blind to information that doesn't fit your perspective. This is usually a bad approach if you like to understand reality.
Instead, constantly test your favorite ideas for weaknesses. Be humble about the extent of your expertise. Be curious about new information that doesn't fit, and information from other fields.
Talking to people who contradict you, disagree with you, and put forward different ideas as a great resource for understanding the world.
Two main reasons why people often focus on a single perspective when it comes to understanding the world. The obvious one is political ideology, the other is professional.
The Professionals: Experts and Activists
All experts agree that population will stop growing somewhere between 10 billion and 12 billion. The historians, paleodemographers and archeologists have all concluded that until 1800, women had on average five or more children but only two survived. Economists disagree about what causes economic growth.
Experts have their limitations, because they are experts only within their own field. They like to feel that their special skills make them generally better. But, people with extraordinary expertise in one field score just as badly on our fact questions as everyone else.
Being intelligent -- being good with numbers, or being well educated, or even winning a Nobel prize -- is not a shortcut to global factual knowledge. Experts are experts only within their field. And sometimes "experts" are not even experts in their own fields. many activists present themselves as expert. Activists who devote themselves to protecting vulnerable animals and their habitats tend to make the same mistake: desperately trying to make people care, they forget about progress.
There is a saying : give a child a hammer and everything looks like nail.
When you have valuable expertise, you like to see it put to use. Sometimes an expert will look around for ways in which their hard-won knowledge and skills can be applicable beyond where it's actually useful. People with math skills can get fixated on the numbers. Climate activists argue for solar everywhere. And physicians promote medical treatment where prevention would be better.
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.
Numbers are not the single solution.
I don't love numbers. I am a huge fan of data, but I don't love it. It has its limits. I love data only when it helps me to understand the reality behind the numbers, i.e. people's lives. In my research, I have needed the data to test my hypotheses, but the hypotheses themselves often emerged from talking to , listening to, and observing people. Though we absolutely need numbers to understand the world, we should be highly skeptical about conclusions derived purely from number crunching.
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 bizzare to many people. 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.
The ideologues.
A big idea can unite people like nothing else and allow us to build the society of our dreams. Ideology has given us liberal democracy and public health insurance. But ideologues can become just as fixated as experts and activists on their one idea or one solution, with even more harmful outcomes. The absurd consequences of focusing fanatically on a single idea, like free markets or equality, instead of measuring performance and doing what works are obvious to anyone who spends much time looking at the realities of life in Cuba and the United States.
Cuba: The Healthiest of the Poor vs U.S.: The Sickest of the Rich
Why be pleased with being the healthiest of the poor? Don't Cuban people deserve to be as rich and as free, as those in other healthy states?
Instead of comparing themselves with extreme socialist regimes, U.S. citizens should be asking why they cannot achieve the same levels of health, for the same cost, as other capitalist countries that have similar resources. The answer is not difficult: it is the absence of the basic public health insurance that citizens of most other countries on Level 4 take for granted. Under current U.S. 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.
9. The Blame Instinct
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.
The blame instinct makes us exaggerate the importance of individuals or of particular groups. 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. This undermines our ability to solve the problem, or prevent it from happening again, because we are struck with oversimplistic finger pointing, which distracts us from the more complex truth and prevents us from focusing our energy in the right places. "Claim" comes just as easily as "blame." If you really want to change the world you have to understand it. Following your blame instinct isn't going to help.
The blame game often reveals our preference. We tend to look for bad guys who confirm our existing beliefs. Let's look at some of the people we most love to point the finger at: evil businessmen, lying journalists, and foreigners.
In 2015, 4,000 refugees drowned in Mediterranean Sea as they tried to reach Europe in inflatable boats. Who was to blame? The villains were the cruel and greedy smuggler who tricked desperate families into handing over 1,000 Euros per person for their places in inflatable death traps. We stopped thinking and comforted ourselves with images of European rescue boats saving people from the wild waters.
But why weren't they traveling to Europe on comfortable planes or ferry boats instead of traveling over land to Libya or Turkey and then entrusting teir lives to these rickety rubber rafts?
Perhaps they could not afford to fly? But they were paying 1,000 Euros for each. Maybe they couldn't reach airport? Not true. Many of them were already in Turkey or Lebanon and could easily get to the airport.
All EU member states were signed up to Geneva Convention, and it was clear that refugees from war-torn Syria would be entitled to claim asylum under its terms. But, European Council Directive from 2001 tells member states how to combat illegal immigration. This directive says that every airline or ferry that brings a person without proper documents into Europe must pay all the costs of returning that person to their country origin. Of course the directive also says that it doesn't apply to refugees based on their rights to asylum, only to illegal immigrants. But that claim is meaningless. Because how could someone at the check-in desk at an airline be able to work out in 45 seconds whether someone is a refugee or is not a refugee according to the Geneva Convention? Something that would take the embassy at least eight months? So commercial airlines will not let anyone board without a visa. And getting a visa is nearly impossible because the European embassies in Turkey and Libya do not have the resources to process the applications. Refugees are therefore in practice completely unable to travel by air and so must come over the sea. But why then must come in such terrible boats? Actually, EU policy is behind that as well, because it is EU policy to confiscate the boats when they arrive. So boats can be used for one trip only. The smugglers could not afford to send the refugees in safe boats, like the fishing boats that brought 7220 Jewish refugees from Denmark to Sweden in 1943.
Our European governments claim to be honoring 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 crate the transport market in which the smugglers operate. Our own immigration policies are responsible for the drownings of refugees.
Blame foreigners.
Indian official so persuasively rejected the claim that India and China should be taking the blame for climate change. The idea that India, China, and other countries moving up the levels should be blamed for climate change, and that their populations should be forced to live poorer lives in order to address it, is shockingly well established in the West. "They can't live like us. We can't let them continue developing like this. Their emissions will kill the planet." It is shocking how often I hear Westerners talking as if they hold remote controls in their hands and can make decisions about billions of lives elsewhere, just by pressing a button. Most of human-emitted CO2 accumulated in the atmosphere was emitted over the last 50 years by countries that are now on Level 4. Canada's per capital CO2 emissions are still twice as high as China's and eight times as high India's. How much of all fossil fuel burned each year is burned by the richest billions? More than half of it. Then the second-richest billion burns half of what's left, and so on, down to the poorest billion, who are responsible only 1 percent. It will take at least two decades for the poorest billion to struggle from Level 1 to Level 2 -- increasing their contribution to Global CO2 emissions by roughly 2 percent. It will take several decades more for them to get up to Levels 3 and 4.
In these circumstances, it is a testament to the blame instinct how easily we in the West seem to shift responsibility away from ourselves and onto others. We can say "they" cannot live like us. The right thing to say is, "We cannot live like us."
Blame Leaders
Mao was undoubtedly an extraordinarily powerful figure whose actions had direct consequences for 1 billion people. When we show the low birth numbers in Asia, "that must be because of Mao's one-child policy." But the infamous one-child policy had less influence than is commonly thought. The huge, fast drop from six to three babies per woman in China, happened in the ten years preceding the one-child policy. During 36 years of policy was in place, the number never fell below 1.5 though it did in many other countries without enforcement, like Ukraine, Thailand, and South Korea. In Hong Kong, where again the one-child policy didn't apply, the number dropped even below one baby per woman.
All this suggests that there were other factors at play here -- why women decide to have babies -- than the decisive command of a powerful man. And it wasn't even Mao's policy. It was introduced after his death.
The situation with abortion is different. Mao's one-child policy did have an impact. It resulted in an unknown number of forced abortions and forced sterilizations. Across the world today, women and girls are still being made the victims of religious condemnation of abortion. When abortion is made illegal it doesn't stop abortions from happening, but it does make abortions more dangerous and increase the risk of women dying as a result.
More likely suspects.
We should look at the systems instead of looking for someone to blame when things go wrong. We should also give more credit to two kinds of systems when things go right. The invisible actors behind most human success are prosaic and dull compared to great, all-powerful leaders.
Institutions.
Only in few countries, with exceptionally destructive leaders and conflicts, has social and economic development been halted. Every where else, even with the most incapable presidents imaginable, there has been progress. It must make one ask if the leaders are that important. And the answer, probably is no. It's the people, the many, who build a society.
Who should you blame?
It's not the boss or the board or the shareholders who are to blame the tragic lack of research into diseases of the poorest. Similarly, resist the urge to blame the media for lying to you or for giving you a skewed worldview. Resist blaming experts for focusing too much on their own interests and specializations or for getting things wrong. 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 causes -- a system. If you really want to change the world, you have to understand how it actually works and forget about punching anyone in the face.
Factfullness 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 you renergy 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.
10. The Urgency Instinct
How "now or never: can block our roads and our mind.
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. Urgency, fear, and a single-minded focus on risks of a pandemic shut down an ability to think things through. In the rush to do something, you will do something terrible.
"Act now, or lose the chance forever." You have probably heard something like this from a sales person or an activist. They are deliberately triggering your urgency instinct. The call to action makes you think less critically, decide more quickly and act now.
Relax. It's almost never true. It's almost never that urgent, and it's almost never an either/or. You can put the book down if you like and do something else. In a week or a month, or a year, you can pick it up again, and remind yourself of its main points, and it won't be too late. That is actually a better way to learn than trying to cram it all in at once.
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 -- when a car comes out of nowhere and we need to take evasive action. But now that we have eliminated most immediate dangers and are left with more complex and often more abstract problems, the urgency instinct can also lead us astray when it comes to our understanding the world around us. It makes us stressed, amplifies our other instincts and makes them harder to control, blocks us from thinking analytically, tempts us to make up our minds too fast, and encourages us to take drastic actions that we haven't thought through.
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. This attitude toward future risk is a big problem for activists who are working on long timescales. Very often it is by convincing us that an uncertain future risk is actually a sure immediate risk, that we have a historic opportunity to solve an important problem and it must be tackled now or never: that is, by triggering the urgency instinct.
This method sure can make us act but it can also create unnecessary stress and poor decisions. It can also drain credibility and trust from their cause. The constant alarms make us numb to real urgency. The activists who present things as more urgent than they are, wanting to call us to action, are boys crying wolf. And we remember how that story ends: a field full of dead sheep.
Learn to control the urgency instinct: Special offer, today only!
When people tell me we must act now, it makes me hesitate. In most cases, they are just trying to stop me from thinking clearly.
Some aspects of the future are easier to predict than others. Weather forecasts are rarely accurate more than a week into the future. Forecasting a country's economic growth and unemployment rates is also surprisingly difficult. That is because of the complexity of the systems involved. In contrast, demographic forecasts are amazingly accurate decades into the future because the systems involved -- essentially, births and deaths -- are quite simple. Children are born, grow up, have more children, and then die. Each individual cycle takes roughly 70 years.
But the future is always uncertain to some degree. And whenever we talk about the future we should be open and clear about the level of uncertainty involved. We should not pick the most dramatic estimates and show a worst-case scenario as if it were certain. We should ideally show a mid-forecast, and also a range of alternative possibilities, from best to worst. If we have to round the numbers we should round to our own disadvantage. This protects our reputations and means we never give people a reason to stop listening.
Picking only the worst-case scenario and --- worse --- continuing the line beyond the scientifically based predictions would fall far outside Gapminder's mission to help people understand the basic facts. It would be using our credibility to make a call to action. Al Gore continued to press his case for fearful animated bubbles beyond the expert forecasts, over several more conversations, until finally I closed the discussion down. "Mr. Vice President. No numbers, no bubbles."
To be absolutely clear, I am deeply concerned about climate change because I am convinced it is real. I understand the temptation to raise support by picking the worst projections and denying the huge uncertainties in the numbers. But those who care about climate change should stop scaring people with unlikely scenarios. Most people already know about and acknowledge the problem. Insisting on it is like kicking at an open door. It's time to move on from talking talking talking.
So, what's the solution? 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 we can track our progress. Thanks to great satellite images, we can track the North Pole ice cap on a daily basis. So we have good indications of the symptoms of global warming.
Since 2014, Sweden tracks quarterly greenhouse gas emissions (the first and still the only country to do so far). This is factfulness in action. Statisticians from South Korea recently visited Stockholm to learn how they could do the same.
Climate change is way too important a global risk to be ignored or denied, and the vast majority of people living on Level 4 knows that. But it is also way too important to be left to sketchy worst=case scenarios and doomsday prophets.
When you are called to action, sometimes the most useful action you can take is to improve the data.
Still, the volume on climate change keeps getting turned up. Many activists, convinced it is the only important global issue, have made it practice to blame everything on the climate, to make it the single cause of all other global problems. They grab at the immediate shocking concerns of the day -- the war in Syria, ISIS, Ebola, HIV, shark attacks, almost anything you can imagine -- to increase the feeling of urgency about the long-term problem. Sometimes the claims are based on strong scientific evidence, but in many cases they are far-fetched, unproven hypotheses. I understand the frustration of those struggling to make future risks feel concrete in the present. But I cannot agree with the methods.
Most concerning is the attempt to attract people to the cause by inventing the term "climate refugees." My best understanding is that the link between climate change and migration is very, very weak. The concept of climate refugees, is mostly a deliberate exaggeration, designed to turn fear of refugees into fear of climate change, and so build a much wider base of public support for lowering CO2 emissions. When I say this to climate activists they often tell me that invoking fear and urgency with exaggerated or unsupported claims is justified because it is the only way to get people to act on future risks. They have convinced themselves that the end justifies the means. And I agree that it might work in the short term. But.
Crying wolf too many times puts at risk the credibility and reputation of serious climate scientists and the entire movement. With a problem as big as climate change, we cannot let that happen. Exaggerating the role of climate change in wars and conflicts, or poverty, or migration, means that the other major causes of these global problems are ignored, hampering our ability to take action aginst them. We cannot get into a situation where no one listens anymore. Without trust, we are lost.
And hotheaded claims often entrap the very activists who are using them. The activists defend them as a smart strategy to get people engaged, and then forget that they are exaggerating and become stressed and unable to focus on realistic solutions. People who are serious about climate change must keep two thoughts in their heads at once: they must continue to care about the problem but not become victims of their own frustrated, alarmist messages. They must look at the worst-case scenarios but also remember the uncertainty in the data. In heating up others, they must keep their own brains cool so that they can make good decisions and take sensible actions, and not put their credibility at risk.
Urgent! Read this now!
Urgency is one of the worst distorters of our worldview. The overdramatic worldview in people's heads creates a constant sense of crisis and stress. the urgent 'now or never' feelings it creates lead to stress or apathy: "We must do something drastic. Let's not analyze. Let's do something." Or, "It's all hopeless, nothing we can do. Time to give up." Either way, we stop thinking, give in our instincts, and make bad decisions.
The Five Global Risks We Should Worry About:
Global pandemic, financial collapse, world war, climate change, and extreme poverty.
Why? Because these problems are quite likely to happen: the first three have all happened before, and the other two are happening now; and because of each has the potential to cause mass suffering either directly or indirectly by pausing human progress for many years or decades. If we fail here, nothing else will work. These are mega killers that we must avoid, if at all possible, by acting collaboratively and step-by-step. There is a sixth candidate for this list: it is the unknown risk, the probability that something we have not yet even thought of will cause terrible suffering and devastation. While it is truly pointless worrying about something unknown that we can do nothing about, we must also stay curious and alert to new risks, so that we can respond to them.
Global Pandemic.
Experts agree that a new nasty kind of flu is still the most dangerous threat to global health, the reason: flu's transmission route. Protecting ourselves in every possible way from a virus that is highly transmissible and ignores every type of defense is worth the effort. The world is more ready to deal with flu than it has been in the past, but people on Level 1 still live in societies where it can be difficult to intervene rapidly against an aggressively spreading disease. We need to ensure that basic health care reaches everyone, everywhere, so that outbreaks can be discovered more quickly.
Financial Collapse
In a globalized world, the consequences of financial bubbles are devastating. They can crash the economies of entire countries and put huge numbers of people out of work, creating disgruntled citizens looking for radical solutions. A really large bank collapse could be way worse than the global eruption that started with the US housing loan crash in 2008. It could crash the entire global economy. Since even the best economists in the world failed to predict the last crash and fail year on year to predict the recovery from it --- because they system is too complicated for accurate predictions -- there is no reason to suppose that because no one is predicting a crash, it will not happen. If we had a simpler system there might be some chance of understanding it and working out how to avoid future collapses.
World War III.
We must take care of and strengthen our safety nets for world peace. It's a huge diplomatic challenge to prevent the proud and nostalgic nations with a violent track record from attacking others now that they are losing their grip on the world market. We must help the old West to find a new way to integrate itself peacefully into the new world.
Climate Change
The planet's common resources can only governed by a globally respected authority, in a peaceful world abiding by global standards. It requires a strong, well-functioning international community (e.g. UN). and it requires some sense of global solidarity toward the needs of different people on different income levels. The global community cannot claim such solidarity if it talks about denying the 1 billion people on Level 1 access to electricity, which would add almost nothing to overall emissions. The richest countries emit by far the most CO2 and must start improving first before wasting time pressuring others.
Extreme Poverty
Extreme poverty isn't really a risk. the suffering it causes is not unknown, and not in the future. It's a reality. It's misery, day to day, right now. It is also where Ebola outbreaks come from and where civil wars start. It's a vicious circle: poverty leads to civil war, and civil war leads to poverty. Terrorists hide in the few remaining areas of extreme poverty.
Today, 800 million people left in extreme poverty. The hardest to help will be those stuck behind violent and chaotic armed gangs in weakly governed states.
Knowing that some things are enormously important is relaxing. These five big risks are where we must direct our energy. These risks need to be approached with cool heads and robust, independent data. These risks require global collaboration and global resourcing. These risks should be approached through baby steps and constant evaluation, not through drastic actions. These risks should be respected by all activists, in all causes. There risks are too big for us to cry 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 instinct. Be less stressed by the imaginary problems of an overdramatic world, and more alert to the real problems and how to solve them.
Factfullness is.. recognizing when a decision feels urgent and remembering that it rarely is.
To control urgency instinct, take small steps.
-> Take a breath.
-> Insist on the data.
-> Beware of the fortune-tellers.
-> Be wary of drastic action.
11. Factfulness in Practice
How can you use Factfulness in your everyday life: in education, in business, in journalism, in your own organization or community, and as an individual citizen?
Education
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. This would unable 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. Most important, we should be teaching our children humility and curiousity.
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 curiousity instead of embarrassment. Those people are not stupid, so why are they using that solution? It is quite exciting being curious, because it means you are always discovering something interesting.
But the world will keep changing, and the problem of ignorant grown-ups will not be solved by teaching the next generation. 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.
Business
A single typo in your CV and you probably don't get the job. But if you put 1 billion people on the wrong continent you can still get hired. You can even get a promotion.
Most western employees in large multinationals and financial institutions are still trying to operate according to a deeply rooted, outdated, and distorted worldview. Yet global understanding is becoming more and more crucial, and more and more possible. Most of us now work with consumers, producers, service providers, colleagues, or clients all across the planet. Some decades ago, when it was less important for us to know about the world, there were almost no reliable and accessible global statistics. As the world changed, the need for knowledge about the world also changed.
Using data to understand the globalized markets has already become part of the culture. But when people's worldviews are upside down, data snippets can be just as misleading as wrong data or no data.
In sales and marketing, if you run a big business in Europe or United States, you and your employees need to understand that the world market of the future will be growing primarily in Asia and Africa, not at home.
In recruitment, you need to understand that being a European or American company no longer gives you bragging rights to attract international employees. Google and Mircrosoft have become global businesses and made their "Americanness" almost invisible. Their employees in Asia and Africa want to be part of truly global companies and they are. Their CEOs were both raised and educated in India.
In production, you need to understand that globalization is not over, however continuing process, not a one-off event. The textiles industry that moved form Europe to Bangladesh and Cambodia as they reached Level 2 some decades ago will most likely soon move again as Bangladesh and Cambodia become wealthier and approach Level 3. These countries will have to diversify or suffer the consequences as their textiles jobs are shifted to African countries.
In making investment decisions, you need to shake off any naive views of Africa shaped by the colonial past and understand that Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya are where some of the best investment opportunities can be found today.
I think it will not be long before businesses care more about fact mistakes than they do about spelling mistakes, and will want to ensure their employees and clients are updating their worldview on a regular basis.
Journalists, activists, politicians are also humans. They also suffer from a dramatic worldview themselves. Like everyone else, they should regularly check and update their worldview and develop factful ways of thinking.
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.
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.
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