Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World — and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
By : Hans Rosling and Ola Rosling
“A hopeful book about the potential for human progress when we work off facts rather than our inherent biases.”
-Barack Obama
About the author:
About the author:
Hans Rosling was a Swedish physician, academic, and public speaker. He was the Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institute and was the co-founder and chairman of the Gapminder Foundation, which developed the Trendalyzer software system.
He held presentations around the world, including several TED Talks in which he promoted the use of data to explore development issues. His posthumously published book Factfulness, coauthored with Anna Rosling Rönnlund and Ola Rosling, became an international bestseller.
Why did I read this book and why you should too
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 people see in the media and carry around in their heads. Hans calls it the over dramatic worldview. It’s stressful and misleading.
It is the over dramatic worldview that draws people to the most dramatic and negative answers to author’s fact questions.(Please click on the link to answer basic fact questions to see how much you know about the world) People constantly and intuitively refer to their worldview when thinking, guessing, or learning about the world.
Hans was suffering from cancer when he wrote this book so it was his very last battle in his lifelong mission to fight devastating global ignorance. It is his last attempt to make an impact on the world: to change people’s ways of thinking, calm their irrational fears, and redirect their energies into constructive activities.
Therefore the book ‘Factfulness’ should be a priority read for most of us so we can understand the actual reality and start focusing on the real problems, before reading this book I too was ignorant of most the basic facts about the world, for me the world looked sad and doomed for our generation and Factfulness has served as a ray of hope.
Short summary of the book to get you interested!
As the name suggests, Hans wants to direct the reader’s attention to basic facts about the world in terms of poverty, hunger, primary healthcare and education.He points out that even in the age of internet where factual information is readily available we often tend to think about world from pure instinct, therefore the future looks dark if we do not identify the depth of problems we think the world is actually facing.
The book has been divided into 10 dramatic instincts i.e 10 reasons why we are wrong about the world.In the following paragraphs I will briefly explain how these 10 instincts distort our worldview and how you can control these instincts to view the world just as it is.
1]The Gap Instict
There is an irresistible temptation 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: that is rich versus poor. The gap is very clearly ‘seen’ in every possible field, best example being politics, but the author points out through facts and data that such a gap does not exist in the present world, “poor developing countries”no longer exist as a distinct group but instead 75% of world population live in middle-income countries and have started to live a reasonable life. When people in USA and sweden were asked about what percentage live in poor income countries, the average guess was 59% ! Whereas in reality the actual number is only 9%, the idea is not to show that focusing on poverty is not important but rather to show that it is decreasing day by day and if we understand this, it becomes easier to solve this problem.
To control the gap instinct, look for the majority.
• Beware comparisons of averages. If you could check the spreads you would probably find they overlap. There is probably no gap at all.
• Beware comparisons of extremes. In all groups, of countries or people, there are some at the top and some at the bottom. The difference is sometimes extremely unfair. But even then the majority is usually somewhere in between, right where the gap is supposed to be.
• The view from up here. Remember, looking down from above distorts the view. Everything else looks equally short, but it’s not.
“Educating girls has 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.”
2]The Negativity Instinct
The negativity instinct: our tendency to notice the bad more than the good. This instinct is behind the second mega misconception.The misconception that the world is getting worse is very difficult to maintain when we put the present in its historical context. We shouldn’t diminish the tragedies of the droughts and famines happening right now. But knowledge of the tragedies of the past should help everyone realize how the world has become both much more transparent and much better at getting help to where it’s needed.The reason for this instinct author thinks is because of Selective Reporting ,We are subjected to never-ending cascades of negative news from across the world: wars, famines, natural disasters, political mistakes, corruption, budget cuts, diseases, mass layoffs, acts of terror. Journalists who reported flights that didn’t crash or crops that didn’t fail would quickly lose their jobs. The news constantly alerts us to bad events in the present.
When people wrongly believe that nothing is improving, they may conclude that nothing we have tried so far is working and lose confidence in measures that actually work. I meet many such people, who tell me they 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.
To control the negativity instinct, expect bad news.
• Better and bad. Practice distinguishing between a level (e.g., bad) and a direction of change (e.g., better). Convince yourself that things can be both better and bad.
“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.”
-Author
3]The Straight Line Instinct –
the straight line instinct — and the third and last mega misconception: the false idea that the world population is just increasing. the world population is increasing. Very fast. Roughly a billion people will be added over the next 13 years. That’s true. That’s not a misconception. 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, the instinct to assume that lines are straight. 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.”
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. annual number of births is no longer increasing. If extreme poverty keeps falling, and sex education and contraception keep spreading, then the world population will keep growing fast, but only until the inevitable fill-up is completed.
To control straight line instinct remember that curves come in different shapes,don’t simply assume everything to follow a straight line.
“here’s the paradox: the image of a dangerous world has never been broadcast more effectively than it is now, while the world has never been less violent and more safe.”
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. These fears are hardwired deep in our brains for obvious evolutionary reasons. Fears of physical harm, captivity, and poison once helped our ancestors survive. In modern times, perceptions of these dangers still trigger our fear instinct. You can spot stories about them in the news every day: • physical harm: violence caused by people, animals, sharp objects, or forces of nature
• captivity: entrapment, loss of control, or loss of freedom
• contamination: by invisible substances that can infect or poison you
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 is such an easy way to grab our attention. In fact the biggest stories are often those that trigger more than one type of fear. Kidnappings and plane crashes, for example, each combine the fear of harm and the fear of captivity.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.
Today, conflicts and fatalities from conflicts are at a record low. We have lived through the most peaceful decades in human history. Watching the news, with its never-ending flow of horrifying images, it is almost impossible to believe that. 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.
“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.”
5. The Size Instinct —
We tend to see things out of proportion, over-estimating the importance of a single event/person that’s visible to us, and the scale of an issue based on a standalone number. A lonely number may seem impressive in isolation, but can be trivial in comparison to something else.The world cannot be understood without numbers and it cannot be understood with numbers alone.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.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 know that it feels almost inhuman to look away from an individual in pain but at the same time it is also important to look at the bigger picture with more focus.
The size instinct directs our limited attention and resources toward those individual instances or identifiable victims, those concrete things right in front of our eyes.The most important thing you can do to avoid misjudging something’s importance is to avoid lonely 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.Use the 80/20 rule always to avoid the size instinct.
“In the test questions about global proportions, people consistently say about 20 percent of people are having their basic needs met. The correct answer in most cases is close to 80 percent or even 90 percent.”
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. The necessary and useful instinct to generalize, like all the other instincts in this book, 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. 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 five powerful ways to keep questioning your favorite categories: look for differences within and similarities across groups; beware of “the majority”; beware of exceptional examples; assume you are not “normal”; and beware of generalizing from one group to another. 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” ,beware of exceptional examples used to make a point about a whole group. someone offers you a single example and wants to draw conclusions about a group, ask for more examples. Or flip it over: i.e. ask whether an opposite example would make you draw the opposite conclusion.
“The main factor that affects how people live is not their religion, their culture, or the country they live in, but their income.”
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 generalizations, or the tempting gaps, are not only true, but fated: unchanging and unchangeable 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. But today, this instinct to see things as unchanging, this instinct not to update our knowledge, blinds us to the revolutionary transformations in societies happening all around us. Societies 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. The destiny instinct makes it difficult for us to accept that Africa can catch up with the West. Africa’s progress, if it is noticed at all, is seen as an improbable stroke of good fortune, a temporary break from its impoverished and war-torn destiny. The same destiny instinct also seems to make us take continuing Western progress for granted, with the West’s current economic stagnation portrayed as a temporary accident from which it will soon recover.
Exaggerated claims that people from this religion or that religion have bigger families are one example of how people tend to claim that certain values or behaviors are culture-specific, unchanging and unchangeable. It’s just not true. Values change all the time.
Factfulness is … recognizing that many things (including people, countries, religions, and cultures) appear to be constant just because the change is happening slowly, and remembering that even small, slow changes gradually add up to big changes. To control the destiny instinct, remember slow change is still change.
• Keep track of gradual improvements. A small change every year can translate to a huge change over decades.
• Update your knowledge. Some knowledge goes out of date quickly. Collect examples of cultural change. Challenge the idea that today’s culture must also have been yesterday’s, and will also be tomorrow’s.
“There is, though, a strong link between income and number of babies per woman. The pattern is very similar: regardless of religion, women have more children if they live in extreme poverty.”
8]The Single Perspective Instinct
We tend to focus on single causes or solutions, which are easier to grasp and make our problems seem easier to solve.
We find simple ideas very attractive. We enjoy that moment of insight, we enjoy feeling we really understand or know something. There’s just one small issue. We completely misunderstand the world. The author calls this preference for single causes and single solutions the single perspective instinct. 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.
Factfulness is to 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. And rather than talking only to people who agree with you, or collecting examples that fit your ideas, see people who contradict you, disagree with you, and put forward different ideas as a great resource for understanding the world. Sometimes, coming up against reality is what helps author see his mistakes, but often it is talking to, and trying to understand, someone with different ideas. If this means you don’t have time to form so many opinions, so what? Wouldn’t you rather have few opinions that are right than many that are wrong? The author has found 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.
“Though we absolutely need numbers to understand the world, we should be highly skeptical about conclusions derived purely from number crunching.”
9]The Blame Instinct
When things go wrong,we think 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 stuck with over-simplistic finger pointing, which distracts us from the more complex truth and prevents us from focusing our energy in the right place.ake news is the major culprit for our distorted worldview: we haven’t only just started to get the world wrong,the author believes we have always gotten it wrong.
What we need in order to save the planet from the huge risks of climate change is a realistic plan. We must put our efforts into inventing new technologies that will enable 11 billion people to live the life that we should expect all of them to strive for. Factfulness is … recognizing when a scapegoat is being used and remembering that blaming an individual often steals the focus from other possible explanations and blocks our ability to prevent similar problems in the future. 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. 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.
” Only in a few countries, with exceptionally destructive leaders and conflicts, has social and economic development been halted. Everywhere 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.”
10]The Urgency Instinct
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.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.
Climate change is way too important a global risk to be ignored or denied, and the vast majority of the world 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.So, what is the solution? Well, it’s easy. Anyone emitting lots of greenhouse gas must stop doing that as soon as possible. We know who that is: the people on Level 4 (“developed” countries) who have by far the highest levels of CO2 emissions.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. There’s nothing we can do. Time to give up.” Either way, we stop thinking, give in to our instincts, and make bad decisions.
Factfulness is recognizing when a decision feels urgent and remembering that it rarely is. To control the urgency instinct, take small steps. Take a breath. When your urgency instinct is triggered, your other instincts kick in and your analysis shuts down. Insist on the data. If something is urgent and important, it should be measured. Beware of data that is relevant but inaccurate, or accurate but irrelevant. Only relevant and accurate data is useful. Be wary of drastic action. Ask what the side effects will be. Ask how the idea has been tested. Step-by-step practical improvements, and evaluation of their impact, are less dramatic but usually more effective.
universal basic health care, electricity, clean water, toilets, contraceptives, and microcredits to get market forces started is what is needed to end poverty. There’s no innovation needed to end poverty. It’s all about walking the last mile with what’s worked everywhere else. And we know that the quicker we act, the smaller the problem, because as long as people remain in extreme poverty they keep having large families and their numbers keep increasing. Providing these necessities of a decent life, quickly, to the final billion is a clear, fact-based priority
The final chapter is about inculcating Factfulness in your daily life, it sounds simple but as it has been already said, we tend to think impulsively rather than base our views on facts. It is in fact the most important chapter, I will not summarize it here because I believe you should read for it yourself.We must learn to look beyond the displayed ‘progress’ also, because even lesser suffering can mean ‘progress’ statistically.
To buy the book on amazon, click on the link below :
