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.
Continue reading In 2018, Hans Rosling argued the world is getting better than most of us think. Was he wrong?
