Factfulness: A Possibilist’s Book About the World
The Book Factfulness by “possibilist” Hans Rosling can be a balm for our over-dramatic, stressed brains. Why is this? Rosling made a lifelong study of the gap between the way the world really is and the way we think of it. Through this study, Rosling finally came to understand the mental instincts we have evolved to think of the world as much more violent, poor, and endangered than it actually is.
Finding Factfulness has been a Godsend for me. Since the 2016 election I have felt that the level of bad feeling between partisans and countries about many things is out of proportion to a world in which I also see so much that is good. If only we could focus on what is going well, and on the things we can agree on! Factfulness provides the data to support a more hopeful world view.
About Rosling
Rosling was a medical doctor, professor of international health, and renowned public educator who passed away just last year in the final stages of writing Factfulness. He was an adviser to the World Health Organization and UNICEF, and he confounded [Doctors Without Borders] in Sweden. The Gapminder Foundation that Rosling founded with his son Ola and daughter-in-law Anna Rosslund continues to promote the dissemination of fact-based world views. Rosling’s TED talks have reached more than thirty-five million viewers so far, and he was listed as one of Time magazine’s one hundred most influential people in the world. Hans described Factfulness as his “last battle in my lifelong mission to fight devastating ignorance.”
Good News and Best Kept Secrets
I thought I knew the world well. I’ve lived for 61 years, traveled to 4 continents, read many, many books and studies as well as news articles. Yet in the little test at the beginning of the book, I only got 8 out of 13 questions correct. Although I knew that extreme poverty has been cut in half over the last 20 years, I did not know that 80% of children across the globe are vaccinated, or that the average girl has nine years of schooling. Judging from a plethora of tests Rosling conducted, the average person gets less than 20% of the answers correct – and that figure also applies to groups of professors, politicians, doctors, and journalists that one would think should know better.
The vast majority of us believe the world is getting worse. But in fact, based on almost every vital statistic of global health, income, and safety world trends are getting better. When tested on our knowledge of these vital statistics we score much worse than chimpanzees would do if given the ability to answer the same questions at random. We are biased toward the negative and the dramatic. To be this way is to ignore “the secret silent miracle of human progress.” Is the world in your head still getting worse? Then get ready for a challenging data encounter: Take the same test online and see!
Are We Escaping Hell?
News, activism, and politics is all about the drama, but perhaps we should take a more nuanced view. For example, Factfulness and Gapminder models 4 global income levels, as shown below.
Each person icon in the figure above represents approximately 1 billion people, and the income levels shown are in thousands of dollars. Now, look at the figure below. How things have changed!
- Good News: The relative number, or percentage of people living at Level 1 – a state of being with no electricity, running water, or reliable food source – has more than halved in the last century.
- Bad News: Despite tremendous per capita progress, the absolute number of people living in poverty or hunger is still at an all-time high due to population growth.
- Good News: Population growth levels off as globals incomes improve.
Extreme poverty numbers and rates are perhaps the most controversial statistic Rosling cited, leading some of his few critics to post “The Confused Statistician.”
Bad AND Better
The ability to hold and balance two conflicting viewpoints in one’s mind is a sign of intelligence, not confusion. Is the glass half full, or half empty? Rosling described himself not as an optimist, or a pessimist. Instead he invented a new word, saying: “I’m a Possibilist.” Rosling urged us to see the world as still bad (in some ways), but getting much better.
Beautiful Data
Pages 64 through 67 in Factfulness list some amazing graphs of bad things decreasing and good things increasing. “Humanity,” Rosling wrote, “Should throw a freaking party!”
Everything is Not Fine
For all the great trending stats, everything is not fine. Rosling: “We should still be very concerned. As long as there still are any plane crashes, preventable child deaths, endangered species, climate change deniers, male chauvinists, crazy dictators, journalists in prison, toxic waste, and girls not getting an education because of their gender…as long as any of these terrible things exist, we cannot relax.”
Why Being Factful is Still Important
But it is just as ridiculous, and certainly more stressful for us to ignore the progress that has been made. Rosling: “People often call me an optimist, because I show them…progress they didn’t know about. That makes me angry. I’m not an optimist. That makes me sound naïve. I’m a very serious ‘possibilist.’
As a possibilist, I see all this progress and it fills me conviction and hope that further progress is possible. That is not optimistic. It is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful. When people wrongly believe that nothing is improving, they may conclude that nothing we have tried so far is working and lose confidence in measures that actually work. I have met many such people, who told me they have lost all hope for humanity. Or they may [become] radicals supporting drastic measures that are counterproductive...”
What We Can Do
I believe we need to get the Factfulness message out there as a call for everyone to take heart, regain hope, and turn with new energy to exercise critical thinking, stay up to date, and be a positive influence in the world.
In my next post on Factfulness, I’ll summarize Rosling’s theories on why we tend to be wrong about the world. It’s not just the news, it is our psychology, our ways of thinking.
In the meantime I hope you’ll read Factfulness and/or explore the Gapminder site some of the videos and infographic tools there. And spread this good news to others!