By “factfulness,” the authors mean “a set of thinking tools.” Likewise, Factfulness “is about the world and how to understand it.”
Gap instinct / How much do you know about the world? The Roslings offer a quiz to test your knowledge. Consider one of their questions:
In all low-income countries across the world today, how many girls finish primary school?
a. 20%
b. 40%
c. 60%
The answer is (c), yet the Roslings found that on average just 7% of respondents picked that answer. Note that if people randomly selected an answer, 33% would choose the correct one. The results are similar on other questions. The Roslings summarize: “Everyone seems to get the world devastatingly wrong. Not only devastatingly wrong, but systematically wrong.”
The typical Gapminder survey asks 12 such questions, each accompanied by three possible answers. (Test yourself: www.gapminder.org/test/2017.) Again, if answering randomly, the average test-taker should get four of the 12 questions right. The Roslings quizzed thousands of people, who achieved a mean score of 2.2 correct answers. Because 2.2 is statistically significantly below the expected value from guessing, we must conclude that people are not just uninformed, but biased. The Roslings call this bias an “overdramatic worldview” and recommend a “fact-based worldview.”
They argue that the overdramatic worldview is based on 10 pitfalls in the way we think. Take the “gap instinct,” which they describe as “that 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.” We think in terms of rich versus poor. “When people say ‘developing’ and ‘developed,’ ” they explain, “what they are probably thinking is ‘poor countries’ and ‘rich countries.’ ” Other divisions include “West/rest [of the world],” “north/south,” and “low-income/high-income.”
In their terminology, there are “four income levels.” One billion of the world’s population live at what they designate as Level 1, with no more than $2 in income per day. Three billion live on Level 2, with between $2 and $8 per day. Two billion live on Level 3, with between $8 and $32 per day. Finally, 1 billion live on Level 4, with at least $32 in income per day. Thus, the greatest majority—5 billion of 7 billion, or 71% of the world’s population—live on Levels 2 and 3, receiving between $2 and $32 per day. The Roslings claim that recognizing there are four income levels is the “most important part of your new fact-based framework.” Hans persuaded the World Bank to classify countries according to the four income levels, though his campaign took nearly two decades.
Perhaps the reader, who the Roslings guess has an income on Level 4, is unaccustomed to thinking in terms of daily income. Note that the midpoint of Level 4, $64 per day, amounts to $23,360 per year. If that seems like a modest income, imagine living on Level 1, with $2 per day. What we imagine will be skewed. The authors liken imagining what life is like on Levels 1, 2, and 3 from a viewpoint on Level 4 to standing on top of a skyscraper and estimating the heights of objects below. “When you live on Level 4,” they observe, “everyone on Levels 3, 2, and 1 can look equally poor, and the word poor can lose any specific meaning.”
To achieve a proper perspective, they recommend traveling. Owing to the impracticality of travel, Rosling Rönnlund developed the website Dollar Street “to teach armchair travelers about the world.” Visitors to www.dollarstreet.org may view pictures of families around the world, their incomes, possessions, and more. “What the photos make clear,” the Roslings say, “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.” Dollar Street helps to overcome the gap instinct.
Getting better / Many people think the state of the world is regressing. Ask Grandma and Grandpa what’s worse about today’s society compared to the past, and don’t be surprised if they say crime. To the contrary, the Roslings show that the absolute number of crimes in the United States has fallen from about 15 million in 1990 to about 10 million in 2016 despite the population increasing by nearly 30%.
Most people around the world do not know that the percentage of the world’s population whose daily income is below $2 (real) per day is steadily declining. The Roslings show that it has fallen from 85% in 1800 to 9% last year. Most people are wrong about the state of the world because we suffer from “the negativity instinct: our tendency to notice the bad more than the good.”
In reality, many diverse indicators of human flourishing, such as cellphone ownership, availability of clean water, and vaccination, are trending up. And many indicators of human suffering, such as hunger, pollution, and disease, are trending down. “In fact,” the Roslings note, “almost every country has improved by almost every measure.” This does not mean all is well: “things can be both bad and better” than before. This reviewer adds, things continue to get better.
Recall Adam Smith’s observation, “There is much ruin in a nation.” The Roslings’ 21st century twist is, “Expect bad news.” That’s one way of countering the negativity instinct. Setbacks, such as the number of deaths from a given natural disaster, tend to be tragic, noticeable, and reported. For example, the Roslings remind us that an earthquake in Nepal in 2015 killed 9,000 people. Those of us who watch the news saw that. Advances, such as a decline in the number of deaths from natural disasters over time, tend to be slow, unnoticed, and unreported, but they are both real and important. One of the Roslings’ charts shows that the death toll from natural disasters fell from 971,000 in the 1930s to 72,000 in 2010–2016. That decline was probably not in the news, but it certainly is noteworthy. Acquiring a perspective of “factfulness” requires study.
An informed citizen of the world knows that the world population is over 7 billion and rising. He or she may have Malthusian notions about that. That is, the typical citizen expects the world population to continue growing geometrically, and reasons that at some point so many people will cause problems. The error in this view is “the straight-line instinct”: assuming that something increasing will continue to increase at the same rate. Countering that, the Roslings offer interesting lessons in demographic history and future trends.
They begin by showing a picture of the world population over the very long run that looks similar to the “hockey stick of human prosperity.” (See “From the Republic of Letters to the Great Enrichment,” Summer 2018.) The population was essentially flat for millennia; then it zoomed upward in the 19th century. Demographers now predict that this exponential population growth will stop. In what the Roslings call “the most dramatic” data they present, female fertility plunged from five babies per woman in the 1960s to 2.5 today. Demographers expect that number will fall to about two children in the future. They predict the world’s population will increase from 7 billion today to 11 billion in 2075 “mainly because the children who already exist today are going to grow up,” But then the population will plateau. When parents simply replace themselves with two children, population growth will halt.
The Roslings attribute the decline in the fertility rate to rising incomes. Higher incomes enable more children to survive, reduce the demand for child labor, increase the demand for education, and pay for birth control. The lesson in particular is that the world population will eventually level off; we may someday see doomsday books warning of impending underpopulation. The lesson in general is to expect current trends to change course.
Markets / This reviewer thinks markets work well in general. When a market is malfunctioning, he suspects government intervention is the cause. Remove the intervention and expect the market to work better.
This sort of thinking is what the Roslings call “the single perspective instinct”: a “preference for single causes and single solutions.” They disapprove of this perspective: “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.”
They put forth the following fact as inconsistent with a free-market proponent’s view of the world: “The United States spends more than twice as much per capita on health care as other capitalist countries on Level 4—around $9,400 compared to around $3,600—and for that money its citizens can expect lives that are three years shorter.” If Americans devote more resources to health care, why do they have lower life expectancy? The Roslings think they know the answer:
It is the absence of the basic public health insurance that citizens of most other countries on Level 4 take for granted. Under the current US 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.
Maybe I’m blinded by free-market ideology, but doesn’t exempting health care compensation from taxes induce consumers to choose more health care relative to other goods? Aren’t U.S. government officials spending a significant share of the total spent on health care—and spending it primarily on the poor and elderly? Isn’t health care subject to many government regulations?
Despite the Roslings’ conviction that a larger role of government in health care would produce better results in the United States, they also see problems in the government provision of health care. “The challenge,” they write, “is to find the right balance between regulation and freedom.” They convince this reviewer that they genuinely appreciate freedom.
Readers of Factfulness will learn of many reasons to be optimistic about the world. Hans Rosling nevertheless described himself as a “possibilist,” not an optimist. By the former he meant a realist, and he was realistic that humanity still faces many challenges.
According to the Roslings, these issues deserve our attention: “global pandemic, financial collapse, world war, climate change, and extreme poverty.” Their recommendations for each are brief. To contain worldwide outbreaks of disease, they recommend widely available medical care and an active World Health Organization. To prevent financial crisis, they wonder whether a “simpler system” would help. They do not describe what that system would look like.
In order to avoid war, “We need Olympic Games, international trade, educational exchange programs, free internet—anything that lets us meet across ethnic groups and country borders.” They do not name the nations they consider at particular risk of conflict, but this line gives us insight into their thinking: “It is 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.”
Global warming, in their estimation, “poses an enormous threat,” yet they do not explain why global warming is costly, let alone perilous. They trust the United Nations to manage the problem.
To maintain progress in reducing poverty, the authors endorse these “solutions: peace, schooling, universal basic health care, electricity, clean water, toilets, contraceptives, and microcredits to get market forces started.” Despite the implication that the introduction of those “solutions” is sufficient for economic development, the authors realize that development is challenging.
The Roslings do not explicitly mention rational ignorance to explain why we do not know the good news about the world. They allude to it, however. We may infer that we have more to gain by learning the story of human progress than we must expend to learn it. Becoming literate in the field of human progress is becoming as crucial as old-fashioned literacy and numeracy. The Roslings’ story-telling, innovative displays of data, and enlightening lessons are a fine place to start.
