Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About The World – And Why Things Are Better Than You Think

The lead author, Hans Rosling, died in 2017. He was Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institute, Sweden, and the co-founder and chairman of the Gapminder Foundation – an organization he set up to establish and promote a fact-centered worldview.

He promoted the Foundation's work by becoming a persuasive and very funny public speaker. His TED talks were thought-provoking, stimulating and highly entertaining, and most of the anecdotes in "Factfulness" come from Rosling's eventful life. The book is co-authored by his son, Ola, and his daughter-in-law, Anna Rosling Rönnlund, but written in his own distinctive voice.

Keep listening to hear why you may be no better informed than a chimpanzee, how to resist the urge to generalize, and how managers can introduce factfulness to their teams.

The Introduction sets readers a multiple-choice quiz. Each question is about the current state of human development, and has three possible answers. Question 12, for example, is, "How many people in the world have some access to electricity?" Other questions look at poverty, health and education.

The point of this quiz is to reveal the reader's likely ignorance about the true state of human development. The authors gave it to a sample of nearly 12,000 people in 14 countries, and they averaged just two correct answers out of the first 12 questions. Only the 13th question, on global climate change, was answered correctly by most people. The authors point out that chimpanzees picking answers at random would have answered more questions correctly than most people from Western societies.

Everything that follows sets out to challenge and correct this state of ignorance, by pointing out what might be behind it. But the authors revisit the questions from their quiz frequently, to illustrate key points in their argument.

The book is divided into 11 chapters. Each of the first 10 chapters deals with a different instinct that leads us to believe incorrect information. According to the authors, these are the reasons why we're wrong about the world. The 11th chapter provides a brief guide to using and establishing factfulness in our everyday lives.

First, we learn about the gap instinct. This is the belief that certain groups of people are separated from one another by huge gaps, either in wealth or opportunity.

The authors examine the gap instinct by dividing the world's population into four levels, according to income. They do this to avoid the binary distinction between the developing world and the developed one, which they feel is outdated and inaccurate.

In this framework, people at level one live on around one dollar a day, people at level two earn $4 a day, people at level three make $16 a day, and people at level four are on $64 a day or more.

The differences between these four levels are significant and striking, and the authors explain them in terms of basic needs: water, transport, cooking facilities, and food.

However, there is a weakness in the authors' argument. The income levels are somewhat oversimplified, and they give the impression that there's no continuity from one group to the next.

The key point here is that five out of every seven people live on the two middle levels. We tend to believe in a world divided into haves and have-nots. But the authors demonstrate that most people actually live in the middle ground between the extremes of poverty and great wealth, exactly where we might expect there to be a population gap.

The summary section at the end of the chapter advises us to look for where the majority really is, and to avoid simple, binary assumptions.

Another of the authors' targets is the negativity instinct – the tendency of people to give more weight to bad news than to good. The authors point out that we're much more likely to hear bad news. After all, good news isn't reported much in the media, while natural disasters, crime and war all make for compelling news stories.

People also tend to believe that things are getting worse. We think crime is always on the rise, or that we're worse off than we were 10 years ago. The authors push back against this view. In a striking passage, they point out that even in Sweden, one of the world's most developed nations, extreme poverty was commonplace in the relatively recent past. That's the kind of dollar-a-day poverty discussed in Chapter One.

The authors also tackle the straight-line instinct – the belief that things always happen at the same rate over time, particularly if they're negative things. They don't, but the belief that they do is as strong as it is misleading.

For example, we tend to assume that the world's population is increasing at the same rate as it did 50 or 100 years ago. In fact, the rate of increase is slowing, and will likely level off by the end of the 21st century. The population may even fall after that. Again, the authors draw attention to common inaccurate assumptions, fueled by sensationalist reporting, and they point out that data often tells us a completely different story.

The authors highlight the role of the news media throughout the book, and this comes to the fore in the chapter about the fear instinct.

People consistently overestimate the importance of things they're afraid of. Journalists often feed us stories that paint a darker version of the world than the data support. And then our tendency to be afraid does the rest.

Stories about terrorism, disaster and war, for example, lead us to believe the world is far less safe than it is. In the words of the authors, our "intellectual capacity is blocked by fear and sorrow."

The authors do admit that terrorism is on the increase. But they point out that it's mostly in the poorest areas of the world. In general, it's not increasing in the Western world, despite our perceptions. And their advice is not to make decisions when afraid. "Calm down, then think" is their message.

Data received out of context must also be treated with caution. The authors call the tendency to find big numbers impressive the size instinct. Instead of fixating on one shocking statistic, we should be looking to compare that statistic with other data.

For example, the worldwide figure for infant mortality in 2017 was 4.2 million. It's a shocking number. But it's a lot less shocking than the comparative number for 1950. That was 14.4 million.

Comparing data and working out the rate at which things are actually happening may seem like dull number-crunching, but it's the only way to get a clear picture of what's actually happening.

Chapter Six explores our instinct to generalize, which comes from the human tendency to reason using categories. We often believe stereotypes. As an example, when we think of the "developed world" and the "developing world," we tend to think in terms of blocks, with no difference between the individuals in each group.

Generalization is sometimes a helpful way of thinking. In fact, it can be essential, in certain situations. But generalizing incorrectly can be very risky. For example, doctors used to advise new parents to put their babies to sleep on their fronts, based on a generalization. Unconscious adults placed in the recovery position, on their fronts, were more likely to survive, so the same generalization was applied to babies.

Data would later show that babies were more likely to die from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or cot death, if put to sleep on their fronts. The generalization about the recovery position may have led to the deaths of as many as 60,000 babies.

We also learn here about the destiny instinct. We often assume that things won't change, because they never have. For example, we tend to believe that certain parts of the world may never become wealthier, or safer, or healthier. Poverty, danger and sickness are just "the way it is" there.

But that's not true. The authors show that in some poor countries, progress has been more rapid than it was in countries in the developed world.

It makes sense to look at data, and the problems they describe, from as many different perspectives as possible before deciding on a course of action. In short, we should avoid the single perspective instinct, even if the outcomes are uncomfortable.

When things go wrong, we often look for someone to blame. Not so fast, say the authors. The blame instinct is a particularly strong and negative one. We like to hold people responsible for disasters, even when it's unfair to do so. Conversely, we build up some people into heroes when things go well.

For example, one thread running through the book is that the Western news media promote a skewed worldview. By this point, the reader may be inclined to blame them for pretty much everything. But that's not right, say the authors. A selected group of journalists turned out to be as ignorant as the general public when subjected to the quiz in the book's introduction. Although they have a responsibility to report the world factually, media outlets are still subject to instinctive bias.

This may be the case, but reputable news organizations do make an effort to check facts before publication. Although reporters may be fallible humans, systems are in place to guard against the spread of misinformation. We think the authors could have acknowledged this.

The book moves on to deal with the dangers posed by incomplete knowledge and the urgency instinct, where we leap to conclusions about a situation and take action too quickly. The lead author recounts a harrowing anecdote to illustrate this.

In response to a medical emergency in Mozambique, he personally agreed with a local mayor that a roadblock would be a good idea, to prevent the emergency from spreading. In fact, the roadblock led many people to die by drowning, as they tried to get around it by traveling to market by sea, in ill-equipped boats. It was a decision that stayed with the author for the rest of his life.

The lesson is not to trust your instinct when you feel that something is urgent, unless you have relevant, accurate data to back up that belief. Before taking any action, you should always consider what the side effects might be.

The book ends with a brief guide to putting factfulness into effect in our everyday lives. There's a list of key points that children should be learning in schools, and suggestions for how managers might apply factfulness within organizations.

One idea is that managers should always be open to new, accurate information, and seek it out, even if it means having to confront their own lack of knowledge. A strong grasp of facts could revolutionize decisions on future investment in sub-Saharan Africa, for example.

This is a book about how we interpret and use data. But it's not just a list of assumptions and counter-arguments. It's illuminated by vivid, powerful anecdotes. These are sometimes moving, and often deeply personal.

We hear how lead author Hans Rosling messed up as a young doctor when treating a pilot whose plane had crashed, and how he was saved from a machete-wielding mob in central Africa.

The tone throughout is conversational, and occasionally irreverent. Rosling is a natural raconteur. He's also self-deprecating and humble.

If we have a criticism of the book it's that the tone is occasionally a little too confrontational. Nobody likes being told they're as likely to be right about a fact as a chimpanzee, and the authors' passion for data could give some readers the feeling they're being lectured. It's also true that most readers won't have the same access to data as the authors, despite this book's ample list of sources.

In fact, while we're told we need to check our facts, it's not always clear where we should be looking for information. We think this risks undermining the whole point of the book, as we may end up reaching for the same old unreliable evidence as we seek the truth.

"Factfulness" by Hans Rosling, with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund, is published by Scepter.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights. Thanks for listening.