Factfulness

The model

Hans Rosling was a Swedish physician who worked for years on disease in rural Mozambique and later became a professor of international health at the Karolinska Institute. With his son Ola Rosling and daughter-in-law Anna Rosling Rönnlund, he founded the Gapminder Foundation to make global data understandable, and became famous for lectures in which bubbles representing countries moved across a screen through two centuries of health and wealth. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer while writing Factfulness and died in February 2017, before it was published the following year. Ola and Anna completed it.

The book begins with a test of thirteen factual questions about the world: what share of the world’s population lives in low-income countries, how the share in extreme poverty has changed over twenty years, how many of the world’s one-year-old children have been vaccinated. Across many countries and audiences, including experts, journalists and political leaders, people consistently do worse than chance would predict. The Roslings point out that chimpanzees picking answers at random would beat them. The errors are not random but systematic and almost always pessimistic.

The model explains why through ten instincts.

The gap instinct divides the world into two groups, rich and poor, developed and developing, when most people actually live in the middle. The Roslings propose four income levels instead, from people living on less than about two dollars a day to those living on more than thirty-two.

The negativity instinct notices the bad more than the good, and the news reports sudden events rather than slow improvements.

The straight line instinct assumes trends continue unchanged, as when people assume world population will keep rising at the same rate, though demographers expect it to level off.

The fear instinct overweights dramatic risks such as plane crashes and terrorism relative to common ones.

The size instinct misjudges numbers presented in isolation, without comparison or proportion.

The generalisation instinct puts things into misleading categories.

The destiny instinct assumes that cultures and countries cannot change.

The single perspective instinct relies on one idea or one expert for every problem.

The blame instinct looks for a villain when causes lie in systems.

The urgency instinct pushes for immediate action that prevents careful thought.

For each, the book offers a rule of thumb: look for the majority in the middle, expect bad news, remember that lines may curve, calculate risks, compare numbers, question categories, notice slow change, use many tools, look for causes not culprits, take small steps.

Seeing with it

The model’s power is clearest in the data it corrects. The share of the world’s people living in extreme poverty fell dramatically in the decades before the book, life expectancy rose almost everywhere and child mortality fell sharply. Most people did not know this. Rosling’s Dollar Street project, which photographs the homes of families at different income levels around the world, shows that people on the same income live similarly whatever their country, and that culture explains less of the difference than income does.

The book is careful to say that improvement does not mean everything is fine. Rosling’s phrase for the stance is that things can be both bad and better: a premature baby in an incubator is in a bad condition but improving. The book argues for keeping both thoughts in mind.

Where the model stops

Rosling was explicit that factfulness is not optimism. He described himself as a possibilist, someone who neither hopes without reason nor fears without reason. Some reviewers felt that the book’s emphasis on progress made it easier to overlook problems that were getting worse, such as climate change and inequality within countries. The book addresses climate directly, in its final chapters, as one of a few global risks that deserve serious concern, and Rosling argued against exaggeration there as elsewhere, because exaggeration damages credibility.

The data in the book also date from before 2018. The COVID-19 pandemic set back several measures, including extreme poverty and life expectancy, in the years after its publication, though many have since recovered. The method, checking one’s picture against current data, remains the point.

Since it was published

The book became an international bestseller, and Bill Gates gave copies to every American college graduate who wanted one in 2018. The Gapminder Foundation continues to publish data tools and survey results showing how people answer the questions. The book’s approach has influenced how journalists and teachers present global data, including the widespread use of income levels rather than “developed” and “developing” countries, a change the World Bank also made in its own classifications.

Questions it lets you ask

Are we picturing two groups when most cases lie in between? Is this number big or small compared with what? Is the trend we are extrapolating really a straight line? Are we reacting to a dramatic event or to a real change in risk? Who are we blaming, and what system produced the result? Is this urgent, or does it only feel urgent? And when did we last check our picture of the world against the data?