Factfulness | Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling

I. Brief Summary

A fresh perspective on human progress at a global level in poverty, wealth, population increase, births, mortality, education, healthcare, gender equality, conflict, energy, and the environment. Hans Rosling highlights all of this while building your world-view based on facts not drama. A must read and pairs well with Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman to improve your worldly view and critical thinking.

II. Big Ideas

• Rosling highlights the problem that we tend to hold a view of a divide between developed and developing countries that made more sense a few decades ago. Now this divided view simply doesn’t reflect the huge convergence in data we have seen since as a result of improving conditions across the world. He suggests a more relevant worldview broken down into 4 levels of income:
  • Level 1: $1 per day
  • Level 2: $2-$8 per day
  • Level 3: $8-$32 per day
  • Level 4: $32+ per day
• 10 human instincts that lead to incorrect thinking which Hans Rosling goes in detail:
  • The Gap Instinct: The gap instinct is our tendency to divide things into two distinct and often conflicting groups, missing the gap between.
    • Example: We tend to divide countries into ‘developing’ and ‘developed’ countries, but the data shows this view is no longer fit for purpose on measures of income, education, healthcare, and so on.
    • Factfulness is ... recognizing when a story talks about a gap, and remembering that this paints a picture of two separate groups, with a gap in between. The reality is often not polarized at all. Usually the majority is right there in the middle, where the gap is supposed to be. To control the gap instinct, look for the majority.
      • Beware of comparisons of averages.
      • Beware of comparisons of extremes.
      • The view from up here. Remember, looking down from above distorts the view. Everything else looks equally short, but it's not.
  • The Negativity Instinct: The negativity instinct is our tendency to notice the bad more than the good.
    • Example: The majority of people think the world is getting worse, but the reality is very different. The proportion of people living in extreme poverty has almost halved in the last 20 years. We’ve also seen tremendous progress on life expectancies. No country in the world now has a life expectancy below 50.
    • 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. 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.
      • Good news is not news. Good news is almost never reported. So news is almost always bad. When you see bad news, ask whether equally positive news would have reached you.
      • Gradual improvement is not news. When a trend is gradually improving, with periodic dips, you are more likely to notice the dips than the overall improvement.
      • More news does not equal more suffering. More bad news is sometimes due to better surveillance of suffering, not a worsening world.
      • Beware of rosy pasts. People often glorify their early experiences, and nations often glorify their histories.
  • The Straight Line Instinct: The straight-line instinct is our tendency to assume linear trends in data will continue in a straight line.
    • Example: We the rate of growth in the world population will continue, not realising that there are 2 billion children today and the UN forecasts there will be 2 billion children in 2100. We therefore need to understand how the number of children decreases as we move up the income levels.
    • Factfulness is ... recognizing the assumption that a line will just continue straight, and remembering that such lines are rare in reality. To control the straight line instinct, don't assume straight lines and remember that curves come in different shapes.
  • The Fear Instinct: The fear instinct is our tendency to overestimate risks due to our natural fears of factors such as violence, captivity and contamination.
    • Example: Rosling runs through a range of areas in which risks have drastically reduced, such as the number of deaths from natural disasters, flight safety and contamination.
    • 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 as few decisions as possible until the panic has subsided.
  • The Size Instinct: The size instinct is our tendency to look at a lonely number (or a single instance or victim) and misjudge its importance.
    • Example: Rosling uses the example of child deaths in hospital drawing attention away from the issue of systems that kill far more outside of the hospital in the first place.
    • Factfulness is ... recognizing when a lonely number seems impressive (small or large), and remembering that you could get the opposite impression if it were compared with or divided by some other relevant number. To control the size instinct, get things in proportion.
      • Compare. Big numbers always look big. Single numbers on their own are misleading and should make you suspicious. Always look for comparisons. Ideally, divide by something.
      • 80/20. Have you been given a long list? 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.
  • The Generalization Instinct: The generalisation instinct is our tendency to generalise groups of individuals and countries, even if there are significant differences between them.
    • Example: Those in the Level 4 income group tend to generalise those in groups below as worse off than they really are.
    • Factfulness is ... recognizing when a category is being used in an explanation, and remembering that categories can be misleading. We can't stop generalization and we shouldn't even try. What we should try to do is to avoid generalizing incorrectly. To control the generalization instinct, question your categories.
      • Look for differences within groups. Especially when the groups are large, look for ways to split them into smaller, more precise categories. And...
      • Look for similarities across groups. If you find striking similarities between different groups, consider whether your categories are relevant. But also...
      • Look for differences across groups. Do not assume that what applies for one group (e.g. you and other people living on Level 4 or unconscious soldiers) applies for another (e.g. people not living on Level 4 or sleeping babies).
      • Beware of "the majority". The majority just means more than half. Ask whether it means 51 percent, 99 percent, or something in between.
      • Beware of vivid examples. Vivid images are easier to recall but they might be the exception rather than the rule.
      • Assume people are not idiots. When something looks strange, be curious and humble, and think, “in what way is this a smart solution?”
  • The Destiny Instinct: The destiny instinct is our tendency to assume innate characteristics determine the destinies of people, countries, religions and cultures.
    • Example: The perception that Africa is not capable of far-reaching economic progress is not based on the facts of the last four decades.
    • 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. Technology, countries, societies, cultures, and religions are constantly changing.
      • Talk to Grandpa. If you want to be reminded of how values have changed, think about your grandparents' values and how they differ from yours.
      • Collect examples of cultural change. Challenge the idea that today's culture must also have been yesterday's, and will also be tomorrow's.
  • The Single Perspective Instinct: The single perspective instinct is our tendency to prefer single causes and single solutions.
    • Example: Political ideologues can get fixated on one form of economic system, but a one-size-fits-all approach to our economic and political systems is rarely the most effective.
    • Factfulness is ... recognizing that a single perspective can limit your imagination, and remembering that it is better to look at problems from many angles to get a more accurate understanding and find practical solutions. To control the single perspective instinct, get a toolbox, not a hammer.
      • Test your ideas. Don't only collect examples that show how excellent your favourite ideas are. Have people who disagree with you test your ideas and find their weaknesses.
      • Limited expertise. Don't claim expertise beyond your field: be humble about what you don't know. Be aware too of the limits of the expertise of others.
      • Hammers and nails. If you are good with a tool, you may want to use it too often. If you have analyzed a problem in depth, you can end up exaggerating the importance of that problem or of your solution. Remember that no one tool is good for everything. If your favourite tool is a hammer, look for colleagues with screwdrivers, wrenches, and tape measures. Be open to ideas from other fields.
      • Numbers, but not only numbers. The world cannot be understood without numbers, and it cannot be understood with numbers alone. Love numbers for what they tell you about real lives.
      • Beware of simple ideas and simple solutions. History is full of visionaries who used simple utopian visions to justify terrible actions. Welcome complexity. Combine ideas. Compromise. Solve problems on a case-by-case basis.
  • The Blame Instinct: The blame instinct is our need to find a clear and simple reason for why something bad has happened.
    • Example: The media is constantly looking for a single scapegoat for negative stories, but often these negative stories are the result of much more complex underlying systems.
    • Factfulness is ... recognizing when a scapegoat is being used and remembering that blaming an individual often steals the focus from other possible explanations and blocks our ability to prevent similar problems in the future. To control the blame instinct, resist finding a scapegoat.
      • Look for causes, not villains. When something goes wrong, don't look for an individual or a group to blame. Accept that bad things can happen without anyone intending them to. Instead, spend your energy on understanding the multiple interacting causes, or system, that created the situation.
      • Look for systems, not heroes. When someone claims to have caused something good, ask whether the outcome might have happened anyway, even if that individual had done nothing. Give the system some credit.
  • The Urgency Instinct: The urgency instinct is our need to take immediate action in face of perceived danger.
    • Example: Rosling uses the example of worst-case climate change and epidemiological data being used to create a sense of urgency, but ultimately such exaggerations undermine the cause.
    • Factfulness is ... recognizing when a decision feels urgent and remembering that it rarely is. To control the urgency instinct, take small steps.
      • Take a breath. When your urgency instinct is triggered, your other instincts kick in and your analysis shuts down. Ask for more time and more information. It's rarely now or never and it's rarely either/or.
      • Insist on the data. If something is urgent and important, it should be measured. Beware of data that is relevant but inaccurate, or accurate but irrelevant. Only relevant and accurate data is useful.
      • Beware of fortune-tellers. Any prediction about the future is uncertain. Be wary of predictions that fail to acknowledge that. Insist on a full range of scenarios, never just the best or worst case. Ask how often such predictions have been right before.
      • Be wary of drastic action. Ask what the side effects will be. Ask how the idea has been tested. Step-by-step practical improvements, and evaluation of their impact, are less dramatic but usually more effective.

III. Quotes

• Cultures, nations, religions, and people are not rocks. They are in constant transformation.
• Every group of people I ask thinks the world is more frightening, more violent, and more hopeless—in short, more dramatic than it really is.
• There was a balance. It wasn’t because humans lived in balance with nature. Humans died in balance with nature.
• There’s no room for facts when our minds are occupied by fear.
• And thanks to increasing press freedom and improving technology, we hear more, about more disasters, than ever before.
• 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.
• 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.
• The world cannot be understood without numbers. But the world cannot be understood with numbers alone.
• Remember: things can be bad, and getting better.
• I want people, when they realize they have been wrong about the world, to feel not embarrassment, but that childlike sense of wonder, inspiration, and curiosity that I remember from the circus, and that I still get every time I discover I have been wrong: “Wow, how is that even possible?
• Look for systems, not heroes.
• Look for causes, not villains.
• I think this is because human beings have a strong dramatic instinct toward binary thinking, a basic urge to divide things into two distinct groups, with nothing but an empty gap in between. We love to dichotomize. Good versus bad. Heroes versus villians. My country versus the rest. Dividing the world into two distinct sides is simple and intuitive, and also dramatic because it implies conflict, and we do it without thinking, all the time.
• Journalists know this. They set up their narratives as conflicts between two opposing people, views, or groups. They prefer stories of extreme poverty and billionaires to stories about the vast majority of people slowly dragging themselves toward better lives. Journalists are storytellers.
• 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.
• People often call me an optimist, because I show them the enormous progress they didn't know about. That makes me angry. I'm not an optimist. That makes me sound naive. I'm a very serious “possibilist.” That's something I made up. It means someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason, someone who constantly resists the overdramatic worldview. 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.
• 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.
• The big facts and the big picture must wait until the danger is over. But then we must dare to establish a fact-based worldview again. We must cool our brains and compare the numbers to make sure our resources are used effectively to stop future suffering. We can't let fear guide these priorities. Because the risks we fear the most are now often—thanks to our successful international collaboration—the risks that actually cause us the least harm.
• The general trend towards less violence is not just one more improvement. It is the most beautiful trend there is. The spread of peace over the last decades has enabled all the other improvements we have seen. We must take care of this fragile gift if we hope to achieve our other noble goals, such as collaboration toward a sustainable future. Without world peace, you can forget about all other global progress.
• The memory of insufficient regulation has created automatic mistrust and fear, which blocks the ability to hear data-driven arguments.
• 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.
• It was you, the richest nations, that put us all in this delicate situation. You have been burning increasing amounts of coal and oil for more than a century. You and only you pushed us to the brink of climate change. Then he suddenly changed posture, put his palms together in an Indian greeting, bowed, and almost whispered in a very kind voice. But we forgive you, because you did not know what you were doing. We should never blame someone retrospectively for harm they were unaware of.
• It's relaxing to think that knowledge has no sell-by date: that once you have learned something, it says fresh forever and you never have to learn it again. In the sciences like math and physics, and in the arts, that is often true. In those subjects, what we all learned at school (2 + 2 = 4) is probably still good. But in the social sciences, even the most basic knowledge goes off very quickly. As with milk or vegetables, you have to keep getting it fresh. Because everything changes.
• Some Americans think of Sweden as a socialist country, but values can change. A few decades ago Sweden carried out what might be the most drastic deregulation ever of a public school system and now allows fully commercial schools to compete and make profits (a brave capitalist experiment).
• Instead, constantly test your favourite 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.
• 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.
• Most countries that make great economic and social progress are not democracies. South Korea moved from Level 1 to Level 3 faster than any country had ever done (without finding oil), all the time as a military dictatorship. Of the ten countries with the fastest economic growth in 2016, nine of them score low on democracy. Anyone who claims that democracy is a necessity for economic growth and health improvements will risk getting contradicted by reality. It's better to argue for democracy as a goal in itself instead of as a superior means to other goals we like.
• 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 game often reveals our preferences. 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.
• One comment caught our attention: “I bet no member of the media passed the test.” We got excited by this idea and decided to try to test it, but the polling companies said it was impossible to get access to groups of journalists. Their employers refused to let them be tested. Of course, I understood. No one likes their authority to be questioned and it would be very embarrassing for a serious news outlet to be shown to be employing journalists who knew no more than chimpanzees.
• Our press may be free, and professional, and truth-seeking, but independent is not the same as representative: even if every report itself is completely true, we can still get a misleading picture through the sum of true stories reporters choose to tell. The media is not and cannot be neutral, and we shouldn't expect it to be.
• 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.
• 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 Microsoft, for example, 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, Sundar Pichai of Google and Satya Nadella of Microsoft, were both raised and educated in India.
• Instead it is up to us as consumers to learn how to consume the news more factfully, and to realize that the news is not very useful for understanding the world.
• 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.
• 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. I call it 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 on every single measure every single year, but as a rule. Though the world faces huge challenges, we have made tremendous progress. This is the fact-based worldview.
• You should not expect the media to provide you with a fact-based worldview any more than you would think it reasonable to use a set of holiday snaps of Berlin as your GPS system to help you navigate around the city.
• 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.
• The only proven method for curbing population growth is to eradicate extreme poverty.
• 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.
• This is data as you have never known it: it is data as therapy. It is understanding as a source of mental peace. Because the world is not as dramatic as it seems. 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.
• Last year, 4.2 million babies died. That is the most recent number reported by UNICEF of deaths before the age of one, worldwide. We often see lonely and emotionally charged numbers like this in the news or in the materials of activist groups or organizations. They produce a reaction. Who can even imagine 4.2 million dead babies? It is so terrible, and even worse when we know that almost all died from easily preventable diseases. And how can anyone argue that 4.2 million is anything other than a huge number? You might think that nobody would even try to argue that, but you would be wrong. That is exactly why I mentioned this number. Because it is not huge: it is beautifully small. If we even start to think about how tragic each of these deaths is for the parents who had waited for their newborn to smile, and walk, and play, and instead had to bury their baby, then this number could keep us crying for a long time. But who would be helped by these tears? Instead let’s think clearly about human suffering. The number 4.2 million is for 2016. The year before, the number was 4.4 million. The year before that, it was 4.5 million. Back in 1950, it was 14.4 million. That’s almost 10 million more dead babies per year, compared with today. Suddenly this terrible number starts to look smaller. In fact the number has never been lower.
• Never leave a number all by itself. Never believe that one number on its own can be meaningful. If you are offered one number, always ask for at least one more. Something to compare it with.