Viewing the world as a binary between rich and poor is too simple to be helpful.
A century of economic development has created a far bigger middle, so better to simplify with a four-level (quartile) income split. Despite this success, most people when surveyed assume the world is getting worse. It’s important to understand in what ways progress is being made.
That’s from the 2018 book Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World — and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, which argues people consistently misunderstand global trends, believing the world is worse off than it is due to inherent biases and misinformation.
My career-long reporting on entrepreneurship has always colored my belief that most people on most days want to make their lives a little better, and so that creates a better place over time. But this book is a canonical example of arguing too many of us overlook remarkable progress we must understand.
The book’s authors, Swedish husband-wife team Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund, and Ola’s father Hans, are insistent that theirs is not a naive or overly optimistic view, though this sort of “globalization has made the world richer and healthier” writing has become deeply unfashionable. Progressive advocates and activists I know deride a class of often-Boomer liberal writer as apologists for an entrenched world order by throwing facts and figures at people.
Still Rosling and team argued they were never apologizing for elites who could rest-easy, but rather doing research to put into context what had worked, so as to motivate the best behaviors to be continued. After Hans’s passing, the husband-wife duo continue leading a research nonprofit called Gapminder. It didn’t help that Rosling gave prominent talks at the World Economic Forum in Davos and at TED, often seen as the heart of this global liberal order.
So though I’m familiar with the arguments and Rosling’s reputation, I wanted to read what he described as the best distillation of his research.
Books like this (and one that came out the same year by Steven Pinker) tend to have two flaws: They overlook how many people are only focused on their personal life not broad global trends, and even many academics consider what these authors describe as an exceptional century, not an enduring trend. For example does slowing productivity and an aging secular business cycle, helped by geopolitical uncertainty and AI technology, portend a reversal of standards for most of us? Economic mobility and wealth equality reached notable highs during the author’s life, but declined since: so is he describing a world that is already changing again?
As they wrote: “Things can be both bad and better.”
Below I share my notes for future reference.
My notes:
- Climate change knowledge is a success story, in that just about everyone in the world has some understanding that carbon output plays some role, but very few know about declines in global poverty over the last 50 years
- This book based on what has been shared at Davos and TED and to Bill Gates, it’s a manual for a group of leaders
- After early years of developing compelling charts and going to world leaders, he learned it wasn’t just data or the media that kept more people from understanding the great health and economic progress
- Book has chapters by 10 mistakes we commonly make
- Authors imply they were the first to use bubble charts to show population size of countries on different measures by the size of a bubble
- Gap instinct: the picture of a big gap between the developing and developed world by, for example, child mortality and births per woman was truer in 1965 but no longer. This gap between a binary of a rich and poor world hasn’t been true for a long time
- Most live in middle income countries; so he recommends a four income level split of the world rather than two
- In 1999, he first lectured to the World Bank about dropping the terms developing and developed but it took another 17 years
- Common ways to exploit our gap instinct: comparing averages (when there are often big overlaps, like in gender math scores), comparing extremes (worst and best; poorest and richest when most people are in the middle) and “the view from up here” (on top of a skyscraper it’s hard to compare the heights of buildings and likewise rich country residents struggle to disentangle different levels of poverty)
- Negativity instinct: majority of those he polls say world is getting worse
- Extreme poverty declines
- Argues that he isn’t an optimist but “a possibilist” — and that showing progress is how you get more people involved
- “Things can be both bad and better”
- Straight line instinct — but population expected to decline by mid-century
- Keeps noting that his three-answer multiple choice questions about the world means random chance and/or chimpanzees would get 1 in 3 but many educated and informed people do worse than chance because of all these instincts outlined in the book
- Richer countries die less from natural disasters and all countries are richer than they once were
- “The big picture must wait until the danger is over,” he writes of not appearing callous in famine and crisis. But more media is giving us more famine and crisis all the time, for all the reasons his books outlined: conflict and crisis grab attention better than brokered peace and steady incremental improvements
- In 1944, aviation industry leaders signed Article 26 at the Chicago Convention, which established accident investigation duties to improve safety. Then “Annex 13” was signed in 1951 with recommendations to ensure safety through independent inquiries, not blame apportionment.
- Frightening and dangerous are not the same thing
- Risk is danger times exposure
- It isn’t doctors and medical buildings that advance health in poor countries but mother education, who read and write and seek basic counsel — money into primary schools, nurses and vaccines matter more than hospital buildings
- Size instinct: “avoid lonely numbers” (context matters)
- The gap instinct makes us and them, and the generalization instinct assumes they’re the same
- The Dollarstreet.org project led by Hans’s wife Anna to let people around the world see other lives
- “The main factor that affects how people live is not their religion, their culture or the country they live in but their income”
- Assume people are rational and ask how to understand another income levels decisions
- Generalization instinct: WW2 research showed unconscious soldiers should be in recovery position on tummies to avoid choking on vomit not backs so this (wrongly!!) got extended to babies — but healthy babies can avoid choking on their vomit so should keep babies on their backs
- Of the 10 countries with the fastest economic growth between 2012 and 2016, nine of them score low on democracy
- Democracy should be a goal, not argued as a good way to do other things
- Blame instinct: Despite Geneva convention, EU policy created the refugee drowning crisis: policy effectively required airlines to require visas despite Geneva, and policy of seizing boats mean smugglers only used (cheap, dangerous) one-time-use boats
- Chinese authoritarian “Mao was undoubtedly an extraordinarily powerful figure whose actions had direct consequences for 1 billion people,” the author writes (p. 216) in a puzzling indirect fashion before explaining that Mao one-child policy didn’t have as big effect on declining birth rates as commonly assumed. (Despite Mao’s disastrous policies causing millions of deaths)
- “Look for causes not villains”
- August 1981 in Memba Mozambique: author unsure of what was causing residents to be suddenly paralyzed agreed with the mayor’s a plan to close the buses into his dense city center — mothers and children selling goods instead paid to load into boats that capsized killing them all. He didn’t tell the story for 35 years. It was unprocessed cassava poisoning (meaning none of the street closures were necessary)
- Author Hans died as the book finished
