Rachit Reviews: Factfulness
Change is a constant in every aspect of our society, for better or for worse. We have made great progress on certain fronts and a number of mistakes in others, both resulting in consequences that we must live with today. From advances in international trade, health, education, and industrialization to extreme poverty, debilitating wars, and opioid crises, the landscape of humanity is by no means homogenous.
How much do you think you understand humankind and the world today? Here’s a quick quiz to find out. Take a few seconds and fill out your answers on a piece of scratch paper / notes app before reading ahead:
Now, for each correct answer, add 1 point and total up your score.
How’d you do? Surprised?
If you’re like me the first time I took this, you probably didn’t do too well (I only got 5 right). Don’t feel bad — this ignorance is exactly what renowned Swedish physician and public speaker Hans Rosling wants to shine a light on and help reverse with data. The quiz above comes from the introduction of his book, Factfulness, and right off the bat, it underscores our unfamiliarity with the state of the world.
This isn’t limited to just you and me. Over the course of his career as an academic and data evangelist, Rosling found that the best minds of the world, e.g. Nobel Laureates, tech company executives, hedge fund managers, and Norwegian teachers, barely understood the basic trends that shape the world. These people, who were perhaps the most informed and uniquely positioned to make the largest impacts in education, scientific, and monetary investments in our future…how could they be so mistaken? Once he realized the magnitude of the problem, he set out to share UN data sets and show the world that things were much better than most people believed.
In Factfulness, Rosling touches on multiple human instincts that cause us to look at the world in a much more biased lens than we should. He provides excellent examples and anecdotes for each, with advice on how to control the instinct and what “factfulness” means in that context. Of the 10 instincts, my favorite and the most revealing is definitely the Negativity Instinct:
If asked if you think the world is getting better or worse, what would you say? Most people would lean towards worse, and right now, who wouldn’t? On the news, we see headlines about school shootings, racially-motivated terrorist attacks, global warming, and new disease outbreaks — sometimes all within the same day. The thing is, in the grand scheme of things, we are doing great. Rosling brings out statistics to prove it to us.
He starts with extreme poverty and points us back to a question on the quiz:
The correct answer is C: 50% of the world is no longer in extreme poverty! That’s incredible to think about, but it’s crazy that, across all of Rosling’s polls, only 10% of people got the answer right. Here’s a chart showing the decline in poverty rate:
If you’re reading this on your Macbook, iPhone, or Windows laptop, you’re most likely pretty comfortable financially. Poverty is probably a bit more abstracted away and it might not surprise you that similar quiz-participants aren’t aware of the behind-the-scenes progress. But this isn’t the only trend that seems to contradict our negative impressions of the world. Here are 16 other bad things decreasing:
This progress is fantastic. It really is relieving to see all of these issues being resolved over time and Rosling believes that we shouldn’t immediately jump to negative conclusions; rather, he asks us to listen carefully to the world around us for signs of development.
“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.”
There are a few different aspects to the negativity instinct, but the one that I find most interesting is “the feeling that as long as things are bad it’s heartless to say they are getting better.” This is 100% true in conversation, especially at times of loss. If your friend is mourning the death of a loved one due to a natural disaster and you say, “well at least less people died compared to a century ago,” he will look at you with disgust. Instead of being apathetic, the right thing to do in that moment is to give your emotional support and help them grieve any way you can. But after that, you can’t get caught up in the sorrow and forget about the context — things can be both bad and better.
Rosling uses a fantastic metaphor to drive this point home: the world is a premature baby in an incubator. With the right nurturing and support, she will get better week by week. However, she is still in critical health and needs to stay in her incubator to survive. After a month, is her situation improving? Yes. Is her situation bad? Yes.
“Is it helpful to have to choose between bad and improving? Definitely not. It’s both. It’s both bad and better. Better, and bad, at the same time.”
In that way, he urges us all to view the status quo not as an unchanging state of good or bad but as a present and delta from the past. This is essential to our future success. There is still an enormous amount of work to be done to solve humanity’s most challenging problems, but acknowledging the trend ensures that we keep moving in the right direction.
