Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

Hans Rosling, “Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think,” Flatiron Books, 2018, 297 pp.

This book is recommended by Bill Gates.  Gates and the author Rosling presented much of the contents of this book at the Davos International World Economic Forum conference and found through the test cited below that most of the participants were unware of the findings in this book, and, those that took the test scored less than random chance would dictate.  Here is the link to the test, it has only13 Questions, please take before reading book report, click on link):  http://forms.gapminder.org/s3/test-2018

The author of this book and the test, Hans Rosling, died a little over a year ago. He spent his lifetime trying to teach us how facts allow us to separate fear from danger.  This book, Factfulness is his last publication.

In ten chapters, he considers instinctual ways we look out at the world demonstrating that the evolutionary skills that made us so successful in our past, may be misleading us today.  He offers suggestions how to conquer instincts formed during our hunter-gather period of existence.  Interestingly, Rosling does not blame the media for our lack of facts.  “Ultimately, it is not journalist’s role, and it is not the goal of activists or politicians, to present the world as it really is. They will always have to compete to engage our attention with exciting stories and dramatic narratives… it is up to us as consumers to learn how to consume the news more factfully, and to realize that the news is not very useful for understanding the world.”

Rosling offers a new framework for how to think about the world. He proposes dividing the world into four income groups (with the largest number of people living on level 2).  This four-part division replaces the division of the world into rich and poor countries. When rich or poor are the only two options, you’re more likely to think anyone who doesn’t have a certain quality of life is “poor.”

One billion people of the world’s seven billion live on level one. This is the extreme poverty level.   If you’re on level 1, you survive on less than $2 a day and get around by walking barefoot. Your food is cooked over an open fire, and you spend most of your day traveling to fetch water. At night, you and your children sleep on a dirt floor and you brush your teeth with your finger.

My Notes:

Pg. 28:  Poor developing countries no longer exist as a group.  Today, most people, 75 percent, live in middle-income countries.  Not poor, not rich, but somewhere in the middle and starting to live a reasonable life.  At one end of the scale, there are still countries with a majority living in extreme and unacceptable poverty.

Pg. 29:  There are only a very few countries in the world—exceptional places like Afghanistan or South Sudan—where fewer than 20 percent of girls finish primary school and at most 2 percent of the world’s girls live in such countries.  Only 9 percent of the world lives in low-income countries.

Pg. 38:  In 2016 the World Bank agreed with the author that the labels developing and developed were no longer valid and they would from now on divide the world into four income groups; level 1, 2, 3, and 4.  The UN and most other global organizations have still not made this change.

Pg. 44:  If you are reading this book you are likely living on level 4, no matter which country you live in.  When you live on Level 4, everyone on Levels 3, 2, and 1 can look equally poor, and the word poor can lose any specific meaning.  Your experiences of other levels are filtered through the mass media, which loves nonrepresentative extraordinary events and shuns normality.  (This four-level framework is, in my opinion, the most important part of the fact-based framework in this book.)

Pg. 55:  Life expectancy has risen from its 1800 level of 31 years to its 2017 level of 72 years.  There’s a dip in the curve in 1960 because 15 to 40 million people starved to death that year in China, in what was probably the world’s largest ever man-made famine.

Pg. 77:  The world’s population is increasing.  Very fast.  Roughly a billion people will be added over the next 13 years.  Many take this to mean some drastic action is needed in order to stop the growth.  Yet, the UN projection is that the number of children in the world is now on a flat line and in 2100 there will be 2 billion children aged 0 to 14 years, the same as today.

Pg. 79:  In the year 8000 BC when agriculture was invented the world population was 5 million people.  This number increased only slowly for almost 10,000 years, eventually reaching 1 billion in the year 1800.  Then something happened.  The next billion people were added in only 130 years.  And another 5 billion added in under 100 years.  It is alarming if you project this on a straight line but that is the wrong line.  Growth has already started to slow down, the UN thinks the curve will flatten out at somewhere between 10 and 12 billion people by the end of the century.  As people become wealthier, they have fewer children and utilize birth-control devices.  (My note: This is based on the premise that food production will continue its increase through technology like the “Green Revolution” provided.  If not, Malthus [1798] may still be proven prophetic)

Pg. 108:  The number of deaths per year from natural disasters has fallen to just 6 percent from what it was 100 years ago on a per capita basis.  The reason is not that nature has changed.  It is that the majority of people no longer live on Level 1.  The harm of disasters is very different depending on the Level you live on.  With more money comes better preparedness; disaster protection costs money.

Pg. 115:  In 1986 there were 64,000 nuclear warheads in the world; today there are 15,000. 

Eight miles underwater, on the seafloor of the Pacific Ocean just off the coast of Japan, a seismic event took place on March 11, 2011, It moved the Japanese main island eight feet eastward and generated a tsunami that reached the coast one hour later, killing roughly 18,000 people.  The tsunami also was higher than the wall that was built to protect the nuclear power plant in Fukushima.  Another 1,600 people died during the evacuation from stress, etc.., not one died from radioactivity.  (Even after the worst-ever nuclear accident, Chernobyl in 1986, investigators could not confirm any deaths from radioactivity in that area).

Pg. 118f:  Terrorism is one of the exceptions to the global trends.  It is getting worse.  The database contains details of 170,000 terror events since 1970.  The database shows that in the ten-year period from 2007 to 2016, terrorists killed 159,000 people worldwide: three times more than the number killed in the previous ten-year period.  However, while terrorism has been increasing worldwide, it has actually been decreasing on Level 4.   In 2007 to 2016 a total of 1,439 people were killed by terrorists in countries on Level 4.  Most of the increase was in five countries: Iraq (which accounted for almost half the increase), Afghanistan, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Syria.

Pg. 129:  Data shows that half the increase in child survival in the world happens because the mothers can read and write.  More children now survive because they don’t get ill in the first place.  So if you are investing money to improve health on Level 1 or 2, you should put it into primary schools, nurse education, and vaccinations.  Big impressive-looking hospitals can wait.

Pg. 150:  The majority of the world population is steadily moving up the levels.  The number of people on Level 3 will increase from two billion to four billion between now and 2040.  Almost everyone in the world is becoming a consumer.  Strategic business planners need a fact-based worldview to find their future customers.

Pg. 155:  The main factor that affects how people live is not their religion, their culture, or the country they live in, but their income.  For instance, on Level 1 you brush your teeth with your finger or a stick.  On Level 2 you get a plastic toothbrush.  On Level 3 you get your own toothbrush.  And Level 4 may involve an electric toothbrush.  Visit Dollar Street link for further examples:  www.dollarstreg.org

Pg. 198:  The US spends more than twice as much per capita on health care as other capitalist countries on Level 4—around $9,400. And for that money, Americans can expect lives that are three years shorter than other level 4 capitalist countries.  The US spends more per capita on health care than any other country in the world, but 39 countries have longer life expectancies.

Pg. 237:  The five global risks the author is most concerned about are the risks of a global pandemic, financial collapse, world war, climate change, and extreme poverty.  These are all quite likely to happen: the first three have all happened before and the other two are happening now. 

World Health Chart Link:  https://www.gapminder.org/whc/

Test (13 Questions, please take before reading book report, click on link):  http://forms.gapminder.org/s3/test-2018

My Notes dealing with the test (276f): On this test, excluding the final question on climate change which eighty-six percent of the people correctly answered, of the 12,000 people in 14 countries given the test, they scored on average just two correct answers for the first twelve questions. (P. 8):

Question 1:  Sixty percent of the girls in low-income countries finish primary school. Pg. 276

Question 2:  The majority of the world’s population live in middle-income countries.

Question 3:  The share of people living on less than $1.9/day fell from 34 percent in 1993 to 10.7 percent in 2013.

Question 4:  The average global life expectancy for those born in 2016 was 70 years.

Question 5:  The number of children in 2100 is forecasted to be the same as today.

Question 6:  The population increase from 7 billion today to 11 billion in 2100 will come from 0.37 billion more children (age 0-14); 69 percent from 2.5 billion more adults (age 15 to 74); and 30 percent from 1.1 billion more very old people (age 75 and older). 

Question 7:  Annual deaths from natural disasters have decreased by 75 percent over the past 100 years, according to the International Disaster Database.

Question 8:  The world population in 2017 is 7.55 billion but the author rounded to 7 billion.  The populations of the four Gapminder regions were: the Americas, 1.0 billion; Europe, 0.84 billion; Africa, 1.3 billion; Asia, 4.4 billion.

Question 9:  Actually, eighty-eight percent of one-year-old children in the world today are vaccinated against some disease, according to WHO.  The answer was rounded down to 80 to avoid overstating progress.

Question 10:  Worldwide, women aged 25 to 34 have an average of 9.09 years of schooling, men 10.21.

Question 11:  None of these three species in the question is classified as more critically endangered today than they were in 1996.

Question 12:  Eighty-five percent of the world population had some access to the electricity grid in their countries, according to GTF (it has been rounded down to 80).

Question 13:  The world is getting warmer; surface temperature is projected to rise over the 21^st century under all assessed emission scenarios. (This is the question most people answered correctly).