When Bill Gates speaks, people listen. When his wife, Melinda, adds her voice, we listen even more intently. In reviewing the new book, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—And Why Things Are Better Than You Think, Melinda says, “Hans Rosling tells the story of ‘the silent miracle of human progress.’ It explains why progress is so often secret and silent and teaches readers how to see it clearly.”
I first learned about Hans Rosling’s work in 2006 when I saw one of the most engaging, enlightening, and hopeful videos I’d ever watched. More than 35 million people have seen his highly entertaining, animated, video lectures since then. Rosling, a medical doctor, professor of international health, and cofounder of Doctors Without Borders in Sweden, died in 2017 just before the book was released. His son and daughter-in-law carry on his work. You can hear the three of them talking about the book shortly before his death on their interactive website, GapMinder.
“Things are bad, and it feels like they are getting worse, right?” Rosling asks. “War, violence, natural disasters, corruption. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer; and we will soon run out of resources unless something drastic is done. That’s the picture most people in the west see in the media and carry around in their heads.” In the new book, Rosling presents data that shows that the world is getting better, dramatically better, yet most of the people believe it is getting worse.
If you think Rosling is one of the “everything is fine, technology will solve all our problems,” kind of guy you’d be wrong. “It is absolutely true that there are many bad things in this world,” says Rosling. “The number of conflict fatalities has been falling since the second world war, but the Syrian war has reversed this trend. Terrorism too is rising. Overfishing and the deterioration of the seas are truly worrisome. The list of endangered species is getting longer. But while it is easy to be aware of all the bad things happening in the world, it’s harder to know about the good things. The silent miracle of human progress is too slow and too fragmented to ever qualify as news.”
In the book, he asks twelve questions about the state of the world to test people’s knowledge. You can take the short quiz and see how accurate your own perceptions are about the state of the world:
- In low-income countries across the world today, how many girls finish primary school?
A. 20% B. 40% C. 60% - Where does the majority of the world population live?
A. Low-income countries B. Middle-income countries C. High-income countries - In the last 20 years, the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has…
A. almost doubled B. remained more or less the same C. almost halved - What is the life expectancy of the world today?
A. 50 years B. 60 years C. 70 years - There are 2 billion children in the world today, aged 0 to 15 years old. How many children will there be in the year 2100, according to the United Nations?
A. 4 billion B. 3 billion C. 2 billion - The UN predicts that by 2100 the world population will have increased by another 4 billion people. What is the main reason?A. There will be more children (age below 15) B. There will be more adults (age 15 to 74) C. There will be more very old people (age 75 and older)
- How did the number of deaths per year from natural disasters change over the last hundred years?
A. More than doubled B. Remained about the same C. Decreased to less than half - How many of the world’s 1-year-old children today have been vaccinated against some disease?
A. 20% B. 50% C. 80% - Worldwide, 30-year-old men have spent 10 years in school, on average. How many years have women of the same age spent in school?
A. 9 years B. 6 years C. 3 years - In 1996 tigers, giant pandas, and black rhinos were all listed as endangered. How many of these three species are more critically endangered today?
A. Two of them B. One of them C. None of them - How many people in the world have some access to electricity?
A. 20% B. 50% C. 80% - Global climate experts believe that, over the next 100 years, the average temperature will…
A. Get warmer B. remain the same C. get cooler
How do you think you did?
Before I give you the answers from the book, I’ll tell you that Rosling has given this test to people of all ages and educational backgrounds throughout the world and the results weren’t encouraging. Most people get less than 10% of the questions right. Even academics and scientists do poorly. Rosling jokes that Chimpanzees generally score the highest at around 33%. In other words, if you just made guesses at random, your chances of success would be one out of three.
So, here are the correct answers: 1: C 2: B 3: C 4: C 5: C 6: B 7: C 8: C 9: A 10:C 11: C 12: A. How did you do?
“Over the past 20 years, the proportion of people living in extreme poverty has almost halved. But in online polls, in most countries, fewer than 10% of people knew this.
Question 12 on global warming was answered correctly by 86%. “In all the rich countries where we have tested public knowledge in online polls, most people know that climate experts are predicting warmer weather. In just a few decades, scientific findings have gone from the lab to the public. This is a big public-awareness success story.”
Rosling concludes, “Climate change apart, though, it is the same story of massive ignorance. In 2017 we asked nearly 12,000 people in 14 countries to answer our questions. They scored on average just two correct answers out of the first 11 questions.” It’s not just that people are ignorant of the facts, but we have a negativity bias that makes us view the world as being in much worse shape than it actually is. This is what Mo Gawdat was able to address in his book, Solve for Happy: Engineering Your Path to Joy.
I know I’ve been guilty seeing the world in negative terms. It’s as though if we see the progress we’ve made, we’re saying that we shouldn’t pay attention to the real problems that still exist in the world. But we can hold both views—the world is getting better and there are still serious problems yet to be solved. If we can’t get beyond our negativity bias—Neuroscientist Rick Hanson says the human brain is “Velcro for the negative, but Teflon for the positive”—it’s easy to lose hope and sink into despair.
No wonder so many of us are stressed and depressed. If we think the world is going to hell in a handbasket its hard to feel happy, even when our lives are pretty wonderful. If you want to get a more realistic view of the world I can think of no better way than to get the book, Factfulness and jump into the world of Hans Rosling. He may have died in 2017, but his spirit endures.
Your comments, as always, are welcome and appreciated.
Short term problems like fatalies and long term problems like oceans dying are not comparable. These do not belong in the same discussion. People want to feel better abut the world and that is a good thing. But to compare apples and pumpkins is a tactic that blinds people to the real urgencies we all face, like it or not. Instead, the discussion should separate the shorter term problems and the long term problems that are approaching the point of becoming irreversable and which threaten the survival of many more species including ours. Bill and Melinda Gates have led the movement to vaccinate children of the world and now the truth about the dangers of vaccinations is finally being made mainstream. Lots of people were able to read between the lines about vaccinations. Why not the Gates’s? Why can’t Bill Gates see between the lines this time? That is the question we should be asking.