The world is better than we think – but our thinking is often driven by misconceptions. In his book «Factfulness», health researcher and statistician Hans Rosling shows why we often see reality more dramatically than it is and how well-founded facts can help us gain a more realistic view of the state of the world.
Has the proportion of the world's population living in extreme poverty doubled, not changed or more than halved in the past 20 years? The last option is the correct answer. However, only 7% of the thousands of respondents answered this question correctly - regardless of their level of education. Rosling begins his book with a self-test of 13 similarly styled questions, thereby holding up a mirror to the reader.
Why are we so wrong?
Rosling believes the reason for our systematically flawed perception lies in the numerous errors in reasoning that we make every day. Some of these errors are based on an outdated view of the world: one that reflects the situation in the 1960s. According to the author, the reason why we have not updated our world view based on more recent developments, is that positive developments tend to happen gradually and in small steps, while negative events occur dramatically and in one fell swoop.
Other errors in thinking have biological origins: our brains are still designed to pay more attention to negative news than positive - this was the only way our ancestors could survive. As a result, negative developments dominate news reports and therefore our perception.
A fact-based view of the world
In his book, which his son Ola Rosling and his wife Anna Rosling Rönnlund finished writing after his death in 2017, Rosling presents numerous diagrams, graphs and statistics as a remedy. These show that the facts paint a much more positive picture of the world.
The book also includes photos of diverse bedrooms, cooking areas and means of transport across different income levels. These photos help bring the abstract graphs and figures to life and show that the outdated perception of countries being divided into developing and industrialized fails to adequately describe reality.
The errors in reasoning
The main part of the book deals with the most important errors in thinking that stand between us and a fact-based view of the world. For example, Rosling calls the reason for the misleading division of countries into the two categories developing and industrialized, the «instinct of the divide». This describes the fallacy that the world is supposedly «divided into two halves».
While this division may have reflected reality in 1965, it no longer holds true today. Countries have converged globally and Rosling proposes a new categorization that allows for a more refined and differentiated view.
Corona crisis and geopolitical tensions
The book was published in April 2018 and became a global bestseller. Since then, however, global development has suffered several setbacks. The coronavirus crisis hit people at the lower end of the global income scale particularly hard. Furthermore, newly ignited military conflicts continued to cloud the outlook. The same is likely to apply to the current threat of trade wars.
Nevertheless, the fundamental statements in the book remain true and help to better recognize errors in thinking as well as make better decisions grounded in a fact-based view of the world.
After studying medicine and statistics, Hans Rosling (1948 - 2017) first worked as a doctor in Africa and later as a consultant for NGOs and the World Health Organization (WHO). Most recently, he headed the renowned Karolinska Institutet medical school near Stockholm.
Together with his son Ola and daughter-in-law Anna, the Swede founded the «Gapminder» foundation, whose website presents statistics in both an understandable and interactive way.
