Factfulness, by Hans Rosling: A Book Review

 

Factfulness, by Hans Rosling. Sceptre, 2018. ISBN 9781473637498

There is hope for the future of mankind and the world, but only if we learn how best to understand it. That is the message of “Factfulness”, a book published in 2018 by Hans Rosling, a Swedish doctor and researcher who co-founded Swedish Médecins Sans Frontières and was an adviser to the World Health Organisation and UNICEF. He died in 2017, so the book was completed by his son and daughter-in-law, who had been involved in his research for several years.

The book is subtitled “Ten reasons we are wrong about the world – and why things are better than you think”. It begins with a set of 13 questions, these being the ones that the author posed when he gave presentations to audiences of influential people in many countries across the world. Each question has a choice of three answers which means that, as he points out on several occasions, a roomful of chimpanzees could be guaranteed to get them right 33% of the time, simply by pointing to an answer at random. Rosling shows that highly intelligent humans often score considerably worse that the chimps!

Here are three of the questions:

1.      In the last 20 years, the proportion of the world’s population living in extreme poverty has …

A.     almost doubled

B.     remained more or less the same

C.      almost halved

 

2.      How many of the world’s one-year-old children today have been vaccinated against some disease?

A.     20%

B.     50%

C.      80%

 

3.      Worldwide, 30-year-old men have spent 10 years in school, on average. How many years have women of the same age spent in school?

A.     9 years

B.     6 years

C.     3 years

The answers, which are based on evidence collected by world bodies such as UNICEF and the World Health Organisation, are quite likely to surprise many people, and that is borne out by the statistics that Rosling presents. For the questions quoted above, the least pessimistic answer is the correct one in each case, but very few people appreciate this. The chimpanzees apparently know better!

Rosling has no time for splitting the world’s nations into “developed” and “underdeveloped”. He prefers to see a gradation across four levels, where a population at Level 1 lives on $1 a day, water has to be collected from a distant mud hole, food is basic and hard to obtain, and there is no education. This is how roughly one billion people live in the world today.

However, it is possible to rise above this level of absolute poverty, and many populations have done so. As a result, three billion people in the world are now at Level 2 (earning $4 a day), two billion are at Level 3 ($16 a day) and there are one billion at Level 4 (at least $32 a day).

The tendency to regard the world as split into two vastly disparate camps is the first of ten “Instincts” that Rosling describes in the book, their explanations comprising most of the text. These are what prevent people from seeing the truth of what is really happening, and why – when the Instincts are taken into account and dealt with – everyone should gain a much greater degree of hope for the future of mankind. It is only by adopting the principles of “Factfulness” that a proper perspective is possible.

The ten instincts are:

• ·      The Gap Instinct – described above
• ·        The Negativity Instinct – the media would much prefer to give us bad news than good
• ·        The Straight Line Instinct - trends are much more likely to be curves or slides than straight lines
• ·        The Fear Instinct - proper calculation of risks often makes them less frightening
• ·        The Size Instinct – the tendency to get things out of proportion
• ·        The Generalisation Instinct - lumping things into categories and making false assumptions
• ·        The Destiny Instinct - assuming that Level 1 populations are fated to always stay that way
• ·        The Single Perspective Instinct - it is important to see things in terms of the “big picture”
• ·        The Blame Instinct - looking for scapegoats
• ·        The Urgency Instinct – saying that “something must be done” and then doing the wrong thing

Each Instinct is fully explained and explored, including examples from the author’s own experience, some of which taught him valuable lessons from very bad mistakes that he made. There are multiple suggestions for how each Instinct can be avoided and/or controlled.

One danger that may come from suggesting that the world is not as bad as one might have thought, and that hope is far more reasonable than despair, could be complacency leading to the belief that everything is turning out for the best and we can all just sit back and watch it happen. However, that is not the purpose of this book and it is certainly not the message that comes across.

One area where this is particularly true is climate change, where the author is in no doubt that the world is definitely going in the wrong direction. Even so, despair is certainly not what Rosling advocates. By applying the principles of Factfulness, progress can be made on this front just as it has been on many others.

This is a thought-provoking and challenging book that deserves a wide audience. As well as being an enjoyable read, it cannot fail to change one’s perspectives and make one see things in a new light.   

 © John Welford