Factfulness - Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
Auteur: Hans Rosling
Ma note: 10/10
Mes highlights
Through pure luck, the troop of chimps would score 33 percent on each three-answer question, or four out of the first 12 on the whole test. Remember that the humans I have tested get on average just two out of 12 on the same test.
Often it takes several generations for a family to move from Level 1 to Level 4
Just 200 years ago, 85 percent of the world population was still on Level 1, in extreme poverty.
To control the gap instinct, look for the majority. •Beware comparisons of averages. If you could check the spreads you would probably find they overlap. There is probably no gap at all. •Beware comparisons of extremes. In all groups, of countries or people, there are some at the top and some at the bottom. The difference is sometimes extremely unfair. But even then the majority is usually somewhere in between, right where the gap is supposed to be. •The view from up here. Remember, looking down from above distorts the view. Everything else looks equally short, but it’s not.
In the year 1800, roughly 85 percent of humanity lived on Level 1, in extreme poverty. All over the world, people simply did not have enough food
just 20 years ago, 29 percent of the world population lived in extreme poverty. Now that number is 9 percent. Today almost everybody has escaped hell.
The government denied that its central planning had failed, and the catastrophe was kept secret by the Chinese government for 36 years.
Beyond living memory, for some reason we avoid reminding ourselves and our children about the miseries and brutalities of the past.
Each time something horrific or shocking happened, which was pretty much every year, a crisis was reported. The majority of people, the vast majority of the time, believe that violent crime is getting worse.
90 percent of girls of primary school age attend school. For boys, the figure is 92 percent.
it many years later it showed me that my near-death experience was not so special. It was a common type of accident for a child under five living on Level 3.
When I was born in 1948, women on average gave birth to five children each. After 1965 the number started dropping like it never had done before. Over the last 50 years it dropped all the way to the amazingly low world average of just below 2.5
As billions of people left extreme poverty, most of them decided to have fewer children. They no longer needed large families for child labor on the small family farm. And they no longer needed extra children as insurance against child mortality
the UN experts do predict that by 2100, world life expectancy will have increased by roughly 11 years, adding 1 billion old people to the total and taking it to around 11 billion
For thousands of years up to 1800 the population curve was almost flat
It wasn’t because humans lived in balance with nature. Humans died in balance with nature. It was utterly brutal and tragic.
When combining all the parents living on Levels 2, 3, and 4, from every region of the world, and of every religion or no religion, together they have on average two children
This means that a fact-based understanding of topics like childhood vaccinations, nuclear power, and DDT is still extremely difficult today. The memory of insufficient regulation has created automatic mistrust and fear, which blocks the ability to hear data-driven arguments.
Improvements in regulations have been driven not by death rates but by fear
It was on Levels 1, 2, and 3 that there was a terrible increase in terror-related deaths. Most of that increase was in five countries: Iraq (which accounted for almost half the increase), Afghanistan, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Syria.
On US soil, 3,172 people died from terrorism over the last 20 years—an average of 159 a year. During those same years, alcohol contributed to the death of 1.4 million people in the United States—an average of 69,000 a year. This is not quite a fair comparison, because in most of those cases the drinker is also the victim. It would be fairer to look only at those deaths where the victim was not the drinker: car accidents and homicide. A very conservative estimate would give us a US figure of roughly 7,500 deaths a year. In the United States, the risk that your loved one will be killed by a drunk person is nearly 50 times higher than the risk he or she will be killed by a terrorist.
This chapter has touched on terrifying events: natural disasters (0.1 percent of all deaths), plane crashes (0.001 percent), murders (0.7 percent), nuclear leaks (0 percent), and terrorism (0.05 percent). None of them kills more than 1 percent of the people who die each year, and still they get enormous media attention
If you are offered one number, always ask for at least one more. Something to compare it with.
So if you are investing money to improve health on Level 1 or 2, you should put it into primary schools, nurse education, and vaccinations. Big impressive-looking hospitals can wait.
In Sweden, a fatal bear attack is a once-in-a-century event. Meanwhile, a woman is killed by her partner every 30 days. This is a 1,300-fold difference in magnitude. And yet one more domestic murder had barely registered, while the hunting death was big news.
When I see a lonely number in a news report, it always triggers an alarm: What should this lonely number be compared to? What was that number a year ago? Ten years ago? What is it in a comparable country or region? And what should it be divided by? What is the total of which this is a part? What would this be per person?
Compare. Big numbers always look big. Single numbers on their own are misleading and should make you suspicious. Always look for comparisons. Ideally, divide by something.
80/20. Have you been given a long list? Look for the few largest items and deal with those first.
Yet this is very common on Level 2: the public health system can pay for some diagnosis, for emergency care, and for inexpensive drugs. This leads to great improvements in survival rates. But there’s simply not enough money (unless the costs come down) for expensive treatments for lifelong conditions like diabetes.
When visiting reality in other countries, and not just the backpacker cafés, you realize that generalizing from what is normal in your home environment can be useless or even dangerous.
Here are some toothbrushes from families with different income levels. On Level 1 you brush with your finger or a stick. On Level 2 you get a plastic toothbrush. On Level 3 you get one each. And Level 4 you are already familiar with
Countries in Europe and North America were expected to experience fast and reliable growth, which made them attractive to investors. When these forecasts turned out to be wrong, and when these countries did not in fact grow fast, the retirement funds did not grow either. Supposedly low-risk/high-return countries turned out to be high-risk/low-return countries. And at the same time African countries with great growth potential were being starved of investment.
The pattern is very similar: regardless of religion, women have more children if they live in extreme poverty on Level 1.
By the year 1900, 0.03 percent of the Earth’s land surface was protected. By 1930 it was 0.2 percent. Slowly, slowly, decade by decade, one forest at a time, the number climbed. The annual increase was absolutely tiny, almost imperceptible. Today a stunning 15 percent of the Earth’s surface is protected, and the number is still climbing.
Update your knowledge. Some knowledge goes out of date quickly. Technology, countries, societies, cultures, and religions are constantly changing.
Being intelligent—being good with numbers, or being well educated, or even winning a Nobel Prize—is not a shortcut to global factual knowledge. Experts are experts only within their field.
US citizens should be asking why they cannot achieve the same levels of health, for the same cost, as other capitalist countries that have similar resources. The answer is not difficult, by the way: 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
We say that “they” cannot live like us. The right thing to say is, “We cannot live like us.”
blaming an individual often steals the focus from other possible explanations and blocks our ability to prevent similar problems in the future.
When something goes wrong don’t look for an individual or a group to blame. Accept that bad things can happen without anyone intending them to. Instead spend your energy on understanding the multiple interacting causes, or system, that created the situation
When people tell me we must act now, it makes me hesitate. In most cases, they are just trying to stop me from thinking clearly.
Thanks to great satellite images, we can track the North Pole ice cap on a daily basis. This removes any doubt that it is shrinking from year to year at a worrying speed.
We cannot get into a situation where no one listens anymore. Without trust, we are lost.
We know that 800 million are suffering right now. We also know the solutions: peace, schooling, universal basic health care, electricity, clean water, toilets, contraceptives, and microcredits to get market forces started. There’s no innovation needed to end povert
recognizing when a decision feels urgent and remembering that it rarely is.
We should be teaching our children that there are countries on all different levels of health and income and that most are in the middle.
Most important of all, we should be teaching our children humility and curiosity
when you do have an opinion, being prepared to change it when you discover new facts. It is quite relaxing being humble, because it means you can stop feeling pressured to have a view about everything, and stop feeling you must be ready to defend your views all the time