Subtitled “Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think“

Which is a really encouraging subject isn’t it? We spend so much time reading how terrible the world is, wouldn’t it be nice if things are better than we think they are? That’s the central compelling thesis of Factfulness: that the things we think we know about the state of the world are often wrong. It’s more prosperous, safer, more developed than we believe.

In a way that shouldn’t be surprising – of course our perceptions of the world aren’t constantly updated, so our belief that everyone in Africa lives in poverty, that immunisations are not widely available in developing countries (Rosling challenges this terminology; he instead proposes that the world is classified into four groups based on average income, which seems a little arbitrary (why four not five or three?)) and so on. Charities feed that narrative – “things aren’t that bad in African so send us some money if you can” is hardly a winning approach. The news does the same – not many people killed by tsunami because their sea defences were well built – isn’t much of a story.

Many years ago I had a light-bulb moment when I read about the Whig view of history, an insight which has stayed with me and influenced much of my thinking. I think it may have been something by E,P, Thompson, but anyway if you haven’t come across it, it is the argument that history is always presented in the form of a narrative of progression and improvement – things are getting better. Back in history people did bad things – public hanging, slavery, denying women the vote, etc – and now we have seen the light, we no longer do those bad things. Thompson calls it (quickly checks Google) the ‘enormous condescension of posterity‘. Why it this version of history so powerful? Partly because generally speaking it is right – things do generally get better. Fewer people live in slavery, most countries have abolished capital punishment, many more people have the vote, life expectancy is going up incrementally, and so on. More to the point we want this version of history to be true – we cannot stand the idea that people in the past may have been more tolerant, enlightened or educated than ourselves.

But this version is not the whole story – some rights have only been temporarily won, and we stand to lose them if we are not alert; most states may not publicly execute people, but they still die from the actions of the state in huge numbers, and the vote is constantly being removed from people for minor reasons (such as in the UK being unable to provide a form of written identification).

So there are two competing tensions when considering Rosling’s central claim – we want it to be true, we desperately hope that the population crisis isn’t going to lead to mass starvation for example (of course we do) and will welcome anyone with a chart that shows us everything is going to be OK because it fits into our general expectation that things are steadily getting better. On the other hand, unless offered that bar chart we stay in our fixed view of the world that vast numbers of other people are poor, that populations are exploding around the world, that fossil fuels are running out, and the ice-caps are melting.

Rosling very clearly proves that things probably aren’t as bad as many of the people he surveyed think. His audiences consistently believe the world to be poorer, less healthy, and more dangerous than it is. Whether this mis-perception is because we are being misled, or because we just haven’t updated our ideas, isn’t completely clear, and it is really this topic – why we get our ideas about the world consistently wrong – that is the focus of this book.

Most of the detail in Factfulness is available on the Roslings’ Gapminder website, either in the form of a series of Ted talks, or in other neatly presented tools. The Ted talks are highly recommended, around 20-30 minutes long and presented with humour, interesting graphics and other visual aids. We all learn differently, so you might prefer the level of detail in the book – personally I found the subject matter ideally suited to the Ted talk format.

Being an eternal sceptic I randomly checked a few of Rosling’s statistics. He claims 80% of the world’s children were immunised for measles. That seemed incredibly high – in fact the World Health Organisation said that in 2018 86% of children were so immunised, which is wonderful. The claim that girls on average go to school for seven years, and that the world’s population of children is forecast to remain at 2 million by 2100 also both checked out. Despite this I was left a little sceptical. Is the world really getting better? Dramatically better in fact if Rosling’s bar charts are to be believed. Of course the issue is not that his statistics are wrong. But there are two obvious objections to this narrative. The first Rosling acknowledges – the fact that people aren’t quite as poor as we think there are doesn’t mean the world isn’t riven by spectacular levels of poverty and inequality. The fact that girls on average go to school for seven years doesn’t hide the fact that millions of girls around the world are denied education, and so on. The other in some ways even more serious objection to the claim that we are wrong about the world is the absence of any underlying understanding of why the world is riven by inequality, poverty and injustice, Without that understanding, trusting to whatever forces are out there which are making the world a better place to keep on doing a good job is infantile.

This is a useful corrective to apocalyptic, we are all going to die, narratives about nanobots, climate change, viruses or whatever is the latest end of the world, Anything that helps us see the world more clearly has got to be a good thing. For a book that is essentially about statistics, it is entertaining and accessible. Definitely worth checking out, although I still would recommend the website first.