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Factfulness

Author: Hans Rosling

What do I know about the topic now?

The premise of the book is that as humans, our worldview is much more dramatic then reality. For example, poverty and access to healthcare have and continue to improve despite most of us thinking the opposite.

The book claims to explain 10 reasons we are wrong about the world and why it’s better than we think.

My instinct is there are a couple factors (but probably more like ten) that cause our negativity bias. My gut instinct first is the media plays a big role in this. They present shocking news that cause us to pay attention. But my primary factor I think that contributes is that as humans we have been shaped to respond to the negative/alarming etc as a means of survival. So naturally our brains are drawn to the negative which compiles and forms our dramatic and consistently negative worldview.

Like this quote from Mindf*ck

Humans have developed a disproportionate attentiveness towards potential threats as a way to survive – we notice / pay more attention to a dead guy than we would the sunset. This is why we are drawn towards horrifying or enraging things online.

I’m looking forward to learning a bit more of why we have such a negative view and ways to think more rationally.

Chapter 1 – The Gap Instinct

A large misconception we have is that the world is divided into two. Rich vs poor. Them vs us. Developed vs undeveloped.

Those views often come from old data. In 1965, there were a lot more developing countries and child mortality was higher. In 2017,only 13 countries fell into the category of a developing country, with big families and high infant mortality.

He makes the point that this example is true across many examples. Access to healthcare, democracy, tourism and almost all aspects of human life used to be divided into two. But they are not anymore. Today, most people in the world fall in between the two.

There is no gap between the West and the rest… and we should all stop using the simple pairs of categories that suggest there is.

The author surveyed thousands of people from professionals to average people, and the large majority scored terribly on questions such as “of low income countries, how many girls finish primary school, 20%, 40%, 60%” with most selecting 20%. In reality, 60% finish primary school, so even in the worst countries to live in in the world, things are better than we think.

Another question he asked is how much of the world population live in low income countries. The average came in at 59%. The real answer being only 9%.

To summarize: low-income countries are much more developed than most people think. And vastly fewer people live in them. The idea of a divided world with a majority stuck in misery and deprivation is an illusion.

The majority of people on the planet live neither in low income or high income countries, but in middle income countries – a category that doesn’t exist in the divided mind.

Combining middle and high income countries equals 91% of the population.

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”

Instead of two views, he proposes four views of income levels. Levels 1-4.

Level 1

You earn $1/day. Your kids walk barefoot to fetch water, firewood and you eat the same cheap meal daily. Your daughter develops a cough, you can’t afford antibiotics and she dies. If you are lucky and have a good crop yield you may earn $2 per day which would move you to the next level. (1 billion people roughly live like this)

Level 2

You make somewhere around $4/day. You can buy food you didn’t grow yourself, and can afford chickens which means eggs. You save money and buy sandals for your family, a bike, plastic buckets. It only takes an hour to fetch water a day. You buy a gas stove so your kids can attend school instead of fetching firewood. You can acquire things like mattresses etc, but there is still risk that a sickness could result in selling your possessions to afford healthcare. (Roughly 3 billion live like this today)

Level 3

You earn around $16/day. You have water in hand, stable electricity, food storage and a motorcycle so you can travel to a better laying factory job. You crash your bike and have to use money you saved for your children’s education for medical but you recover and thanks to your savings are not thrown back to level two. Two of your kids finish high school and will manage to get better paying jobs than you ever had. To celebrate you take your family on vacation of an afternoon at the beach. (Roughly 2 billion live like this)

Level 4

You earn more than $32/day. You consume. Three dollars more a day doesn’t make much of a difference in your life. You have more than 12 years education and have travelled via airplane. You can eat out once a month and buy a car. People on this level have to work hard to grasp the reality of the other 6 billion people on earth. (1 billion roughly live like this)

History started with everyone on level one. Just 200 years ago, over 85% of the world was at level 1 living in extreme poverty.

Our gap instinct is strong and we so easily gravitate towards binary thinking because it is simple. We also like to differentiate between things like good vs evil, heroes and villains etc.

There are 3 warnings we can use to identify when someone is giving us an over dramatic “gap” story.

Comparison of averages

When we compare averages we risk misleading ourselves by focusing on the gap between the two numbers and ignore the overlapping spreads. He used the example of comparing average math scores between men and women. He presents a graph with a narrow score range that shows a deep spread that seems to imply men get better scores and are therefore better overall at math. To illustrate the illusion of the gap, first he increases the score range on the graph which then makes the spread appear much smaller (simple data visualization). He also plots the data into a third chart showing the spread of scores between men and women. For the vast majority, women have a male math twin (they are equally as good at math as their male counterpart).

He makes the point that a comparison of averages and “gap stories” can be realistic, but he says that as a majority they tend to be a misleading and overdramatizing .

Comparison of extremes

Of course the mega rich and the extremely poor exist. But comparisons of extremes are rarely helpful. The stories are engaging and provocative though.

He uses Brazil as an example. The richest 10% earn 41% of all the income in the country. He talks about how the media supports our impression of mega rich living on yachts etc (not the richest 10% but the richest 0.1%) but then shows the data that has shows a continual decrease from 1989 being 50% to 2015 being 41% which is contrary to the “gap is increasing” rhetoric often heard

The view from up here

It’s easy to misinterpret things when we are living in the high echelons of level 4. You may appear poor in level four if you have paint chipping on your walls. So it’s easy to see the world divided into just two categories and say they are just poor instead of understanding the distinction between those with motorcycles vs bicycles vs barefoot. Looking down from very high up, everyone appears very short, but the distinctions matter.

For people living in level 1 or 2. These distinctions are very important. People living in level one could have a drastically different life living on $4/day instead of $1.

In summary, factfullness in this context is recognizing when a story describes a gap and remembering that reality is often not polarized at all and usually the majority falls right in the middle.

Chapter 2 – The negativity instinct

Most of us presume that things are getting worse. They surveyed people in 30 countries and in every country asking whether things are getting better, staying the same or getting worse. Every country had over 50% respond that things are getting worse.

The first half of the chapter is mostly data showing massive decreases in bad things and massive increases in good things. He shows 32 charts illustrating that point.

He claims there are 3 reasons we have the negativity instinct

First is misremembering the past. Once we experience improvements, its easy to forget how recently things were worse

Second is selective reporting. “The never ending cascade of negative news.”.

Last is feeling instead of thinking.

If you still feel uncomfortable agreeing that the world is getting better, even after I have shown you all this beautiful data, my guess is it’s because you know that huge problems still remain…I agree, everything is not fine… As long as there are plane crashes, preventable child deaths…any such terrible things exist, we cannot relax. But it is just as ridiculous, and just as stressful, to look away from the progress that has been made.

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 we should think about the following:

Chapter 3 – The Straight Line Instinct

This instinct is the false idea that the world population is just increasing. And he puts emphasis on just. He says that the just implies that it is growing and will keep on growing and that some drastic action is needed to stop the growth which he says is a misconception.

Again he polled teachers, UN leaders etc on their expectation for population growth in children over the next 100 years. All of them scored worse than chimpanzees would with random selection. (33% with 3 options) Most predicted continued growth but the actual UN model has the same number of children in 2100 that exist today.

He given an example of plotting a straight line on current population growth. It’s obviously alarming because over the last 10,000 years population has grown drastically and mostly in the last 130 years.

But he also does the same thing with his grandsons height. When he was 1 years old he grew X inches. So plotting the straight line, he’d be 13 ft tall by the time he was 30.

The straight line intuition is obviously wrong in this case. Who is it obvious? Because we all have firsthand experience of a growing body. We know Mino’s growth curve won’t just continue… Assuming the trend will continue along a straight line is obviously ludicrous. But when we’re less familiar with a topic, it’s surprisingly difficult to imagine how stupid such an assumption may be.

Chapter 4 – The Fear Instinct

There’s no room for facts when our minds are occupied by fear

Unfortunately, the people on level 4 paying for ReliefWeb are the same people we asked about the trend in natural disasters. Ninety one percent of them are unaware of the success they are paying for because their journalists continue to report every disaster as if it were the worst. The long, elegantly dropping trend line, a bit of fact-based hope, they think is not newsworthy

When the journalist says with a sad face “in times like these” will you smile and think that she is referring to the first time in human history when humans get immediate global attention and foreigners send their best helicopters?… I don’t think so. Not if you function like me. Because when that camera pans to bodies of dead children being pulled out of debris, my intellectual capacity is blocked by fear and sorrow…Claiming in that moment that things are getting better would be to trivialize the immense suffering of those victims and their families… 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.

Fear can be useful, but only if it is directed at the right things. The fear instinct is a terrible guide for understanding the world. It makes us give our attention to the unlikely dangers that we are most afraid of, and neglect what is actually most risky

Chapter 5 – The Size Instinct

This chapter is all about numbers and our tendency to focus on big numbers or likely numbers. But he argues that we always need something to compare lonely numbers against or they aren’t meaningful. How has it trended? Can we divide it by something?

He also uses an 80/20 rule to help keep things in perspective. Look for the largest items first and dig into those as they make up the biggest portion of a total – it can be easy to focus on the small especially when they involve things like human life.

As a rule, use ratios. Especially when comparing countries. For example co2 emissions are most meaningful when expressed by person not by country.

Chapter 6 – The Generalization Instinct

Generalizing is dangerous. He uses a business example to illustrate his point. If we generalize that people who aren’t level 4 are just poor, we are missing huge markets of consumers from the fastest growing areas of the world.

The number of people in level 3 will increase from 2 to 4 billion by 2040, they will be consumers. But level 4 menstrual pad manufacturers for example are exploring ways to sell more to level 4 by special pads for yoga pants, bikinis etc, instead of focusing on extremely fast growing markets across the world.

It will be helpful to you if you always assume your categories are misleading. Here are five powerful ways to keep questioning your favourite 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

If someone offers you a single example and wants you to draw conclusions about a group, ask for more examples. Or flip it over: ie., ask whether an opposite example would make you draw the opposite conclusion. If you are happy to conclude that all chemicals are unsafe on the basis of one unsafe chemical, would you be prepared to conclude that all chemicals are safe on the basis of one safe chemical?

Chapter 7 – The Destiny Instinct

The destiny instinct is the idea that innate characteristics decide on the destinies of countries, people groups, religions etc and that the way things are is the way they will continue to be.

A common representation of the destiny instinct is the idea that Africa will always be a “basket case”

Chapter 8 – The Single Perspective Instinct

When you have expert knowledge, you like to see it put to use…Great knowledge can interfere with an experts 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.

The main point of this chapter is a single perspective is not the right answer for everything. Democracy is an ideal system sure, but democracy isn’t the only way for economic growth, falling child mortality etc, as he shows with examples of countries who improved in those areas under communism for example. He also discusses US healthcare and the States perspective on the free market guiding everything perfectly, which it clearly doesn’t work as well with healthcare as the US spends more per person then comparable countries but has a lower life expectancy.

Chapter 9 – The Blame Instinct

This chapter was about not following our instinct to blame others, the media, corporations for things. He argue that most problems are more complex then we think and things that go wrong are rarely from someone’s poor intent. We shouldn’t focus on individuals when things go wrong, but the root causes or systems that allowed it to happen.

He also makes an interesting point about looking for systems instead of heroes. Often when things go right, we do the same thing and blame someone or some leader, but he argues that even countries with terrible leaders make progress. (Some exceptions of course).

Chapter 10 – The Urgency Instinct

The urgency instinct is the now or never thought that usually causes us to think irrationally. It’s also rarely true that a situation requires a now or never response. We need urgency instincts for survival type scenarios, but we have eliminated so many of those risks, that many of the problems we fact today are more abstract and we have the ability to think longer about them.

Chapter 11 – Factfulness In Practice

This chapter was basically a summary of the whole book. It was also a call to action to remind ourselves to view the world less dramatically, think rationally, be humble, willing to change our minds and pursue continuous learning.

Overall this book was very optimistic. Though Hans said he wasn’t an optimist, but a “possibilist”. The world has gotten better despite most of us thinking otherwise and it is still improving. There is still lots of work to do, but we should celebrate the wins and guard against the ten reasons we are wrong about the world so that we can think rationally about our current reality.