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. Even a person on Level 4 can appear poor: maybe the paint on their walls is peeling, or maybe they are driving a used car. They all look kind of small. In the same way, it is natural for people living on Level 4 to see the world as divided into just two categories: rich at the top of the building, like you and poor down there, not like you. I assure you, because I have met and talked with people who live on every level, that for the people living on the ground on Levels 1, 2, and 3, the distinctions are crucial.
People who have to walk everywhere on bare feet know how a bicycle would save them tons of time and effort and speed them to the market in town, and to better health and wealth. Now you have learned it.
I will use the four levels throughout the rest of the book to explain all kinds of things, including elevators, drownings, sex, cookery, and rhinos. They will help you to see the world more clearly and get it right more often.
What do you need to hunt, capture, and replace misconceptions? You have to show the data and describe the reality behind it. But you also need something more. Misconceptions disappear only if there is some equally simple but more relevant way of thinking to replace them. The reality is often not polarized at all. Usually the majority is right there in the middle, where the gap is supposed to be.
To control the gap instinct, look for the majority. If you could check the spreads you would probably find they overlap.
There is probably no gap at all. In all groups, of countries or people, there are some at the top and some at the bottom. The difference is sometimes extremely unfair. But even then the majority is usually somewhere in between, right where the gap is supposed to be. Remember, looking down from above distorts the view. A: The world is getting better.
B: The world is getting worse. C: The world is getting neither better nor worse. Getting Out of the Ditch I remember being suddenly upside down. I remember the dark, the smell of urine, and being unable to breathe as my mouth and nostrils filled with mud. I remember struggling to turn myself upright but only sinking deeper into the sticky liquid. I remember my arms, stretched out behind me, desperately searching the grass for something to pull, then being suddenly hauled out by the ankles.
My grandma putting me in the big sink on the kitchen floor and washing me gently, with the hot water meant for the dishes. The scent of the soap. These are my earliest memories and were nearly my last.
My parents were not around to keep an eye on me. My mother was in the hospital, ill with tuberculosis. My father worked ten hours a day.
During the week, I lived with my grandparents. On Saturdays my daddy put me on the rack of his bike and we drove in large circles and figures of eight just for fun on our way to the hospital.
I would see Mommy standing on the balcony on the third floor coughing. Daddy would explain that if we went in we could get sick too. I would wave to her and she would wave back. I saw her talking to me, but her voice was too weak and her words were carried away by the wind. I remember that she always tried to smile. This instinct is behind the second mega misconception.
And it is absolutely true that there are many bad things in this world. The number of war fatalities has been falling since the Second World War, but with the Syrian war, the trend has reversed. Terrorism too is rising again. Overfishing and the deterioration of the seas are truly worrisome. Ice is melting. Sea levels will continue to rise by probably three feet over the next years.
The collapse of the US housing market in , which no regulators had predicted, was caused by widespread illusions of safety in abstract investments, which hardly anyone understood.
The system remains as complex now as it was then and a similar crisis could happen again. Maybe tomorrow. The current lack of knowledge about the world is therefore the most concerning problem of all. I hear so many negative things all the time. People in 30 countries were asked the question at the top of the chapter: Do you think the world is getting better, getting worse, or staying about the same?
This is what they said. I never trust data percent, and you never should either. By the way, that is a good general principle with statistics: be careful jumping to any conclusions if the differences are smaller than say, roughly, 10 percent. The big picture is still crystal clear though. The majority of people think the world is getting worse.
No wonder we all feel so stressed. Statistics as Therapy It is easy to be aware of all the bad things happening in the world. That was never my intention. What I show is mostly just official UN data. As long as people have a worldview that is so much more negative than reality, pure statistics can make them feel more positive. It is comforting, as well as inspiring, to learn that the world is much better than you think.
A new kind of happy pill, completely free online! Remember the four income levels from chapter 1? In the year , roughly 85 percent of humanity lived on Level 1, in extreme poverty. All over the world, people simply did not have enough food. Most people went to bed hungry several times a year. Across Britain and its colonies, children had to work to eat, and the average child in the United Kingdom started work at age ten. One-fifth the entire Swedish population, including many of my relatives, fled starvation to the United States, and only 20 percent of them ever returned.
When the harvest failed and your relatives, friends, and neighbors starved to death, what did you do? You escaped. You migrated. If you could. Level 1 is where all of humanity started. Until then, extreme poverty was the rule, not the exception. The curve you see above shows how the extreme poverty rate has been falling since And look at the last 20 years.
Extreme poverty dropped faster than ever in world history. In , 42 percent of the population of both India and China were living in extreme poverty. By , in India, that share had dropped to 12 percent: there were million fewer people living in extreme poverty than there had been just 20 years earlier.
In China, that share dropped to a stunning 0. Meanwhile, Latin America took its proportion from 14 percent to 4 percent: another 35 million people. While all estimates of extreme poverty are very uncertain, when the change appears to be like this, then beyond all doubt something huge is happening.
How old were you 20 years ago? Close your eyes for a second and remember your younger self. How much has your world changed? A lot? A little? Well, this is how much the world has changed: just 20 years ago, 29 percent of the world population lived in extreme poverty. Now that number is 9 percent. Today almost everybody has escaped hell. The original source of all human suffering is about to be eradicated. We should plan a party! A big party! Instead, we are gloomy.
On our Level 4 TVs, we still see people in extreme poverty and it seems that nothing has changed. Billions of people have escaped misery and become consumers and producers for the world market, billions of people have managed to slide up from Level 1 to Levels 2 and 3, without the people on Level 4 noticing.
A: 50 years B: 60 years C: 70 years Showing all the causes of deaths and suffering in one number is nearly impossible. But the average life expectancy gets very close. Back in , when Swedes starved to death and British children worked in coal mines, life expectancy was roughly 30 years everywhere in the world.
That was what it had been throughout history. Among all babies who were ever born, roughly half died during their childhood. Most of the other half died between the ages of 50 and So the average was around The average life expectancy across the world today is Here are the results of some polling. This is one of those questions where the better educated you are, the more ignorant you seem to be. In most countries where we tested, members of the public just about beat the chimps.
The full country breakdown is in the appendix. But in our more highly educated audiences, the most popular answer was 60 years. That would have been correct if we had asked the question in the year when , people starved to death in Ethiopia.
But we asked it in this decade, more than 40 years of progress later. People live on average ten years longer now. We humans have always struggled hard to make our families survive, and finally we are succeeding. The Chinese harvest in was smaller than planned because of a bad season combined with poor governmental advice about how to grow crops more effectively.
There was no food left. One year later the shocked inspectors were delivering eyewitness reports of cannibalism and dead bodies along roads. The government denied that its central planning had failed, and the catastrophe was kept secret by the Chinese government for 36 years.
Think about it. Could any government keep the death of 15 million people a global secret today? The misconception that the world is getting worse is very difficult to maintain when we put the present in its historical context. I Was Born in Egypt My home country of Sweden is today on Level 4 and one of the richest and healthiest countries in the world.
Saying that a country is on Level 4 means that the average person in that country is on Level 4. Remember, averages disguise spreads. I call it the World Health Chart and it is like a world map for health and wealth. Notice that there are not two groups. The world is not divided into two. There are countries on all levels, all the way from the sick and poor in the bottom left corner to the rich and healthy in the top right corner, where Sweden is.
And most countries are in the middle. Now this next bit is exciting. What tremendous progress! The Sweden I was born into in was where Egypt is on the health-wealth map today. That is to say, it was right in the middle of Level 3.
Life conditions in s Sweden were similar to those in Egypt or other countries on Level 3 today. Sweden kept improving during my lifetime. During the s and s it progressed all the way from Egypt today to Malaysia today. By , the year Anna and Ola were born, Sweden, like Malaysia today, was just about to enter Level 4. When my mother was born, in , Sweden was like Zambia is now.
My grandmother was the Lesothian member of our family. When she was born in , Sweden was like Lesotho is today. My grandmother hand-washed all the laundry for her family of nine all her adult life. But as she grew older, she witnessed the miracle of development as both she and Sweden reached Level 3. By the end of her life she had an indoor cold-water tap and a latrine bucket in the basement: luxury compared to her childhood, when there had been no running water. All four of my grandparents could spell and count, but none of them was literate enough to read for pleasure.
None of them had had more than four years of school. But today people in Afghanistan and other countries on Level 1 live much longer lives than Swedes did back in This is because basic modernizations have reached most people and improved their lives drastically. They have plastic bags to store and transport food.
They have plastic buckets to carry water and soap to kill germs. Most of their children are vaccinated. On average they live 30 years longer than Swedes did in , when Sweden was on Level 1. That is how much life even on Level 1 has improved. Your own country has been improving like crazy too. In fact almost every country has improved by almost every measure.
Then get ready for a challenging data encounter. I have 32 more improvements to show you. For each one, I could tell a similar story to those I have told about extreme poverty and life expectancy. For many of them I could show you that people are consistently more negative than the data says they should be. It is hard to see any of this global progress by looking out your window. It is taking place beyond the horizon. But there are some clues you can tune into, if you pay close attention.
Listen carefully. Can you hear a child practicing the guitar or the piano? That child has not drowned, and is instead experiencing the joy and freedom of making music. The goal of higher income is not just bigger piles of money. The goal of longer lives is not just extra time. The ultimate goal is to have the freedom to do what we want. Culture and freedom, the goals of development, can be hard to measure, but guitars per capita is a good proxy.
And boy, has that improved. With beautiful statistics like these, how can anyone say the world is getting worse? The Negativity Instinct In large part, it is because of our negativity instinct: our instinct to notice the bad more than the good. Most things used to be worse, not better. Yet even in China and India, where extreme poverty was the reality for the vast majority just a couple of generations ago, it is now mostly forgotten by people who live in decent houses, have clean clothes, and ride mopeds.
The Swedish author and journalist Lasse Berg wrote an excellent report from rural India in the s. When he returned 25 years later, he could see clearly how living conditions had improved. Pictures from his visit in the s showed earthen floors, clay walls, half-naked children, and the eyes of villagers with low self-esteem and little knowledge of the outside world.
They were a stark contrast to the concrete houses of the late s, where well- dressed children played and self-confident and curious villagers watched TV. You must be mistaken. We have never been that poor. Beyond living memory, for some reason we avoid reminding ourselves and our children about the miseries and brutalities of the past.
The truth is to be found in ancient graveyards and burial sites, where archeologists have to get used to discovering that a large proportion of all the remains they dig up are those of children. Most will have been killed by starvation or disgusting diseases, but many child skeletons bear the marks of physical violence. Hunter-gatherer societies often had murder rates above 10 percent and children were not spared.
Selective Reporting We are subjected to never-ending cascades of negative news from across the world: wars, famines, natural disasters, political mistakes, corruption, budget cuts, diseases, mass layoffs, acts of terror. Stories about gradual improvements rarely make the front page even when they occur on a dramatic scale and impact millions of people.
And thanks to increasing press freedom and improving technology, we hear more, about more disasters, than ever before. When central planning resulted in mass famine in rural China, millions starved to death while the youngsters in Europe waving communist red flags knew nothing about it. Alongside all the other improvements, our surveillance of suffering has improved tremendously. This improved reporting is itself a sign of human progress, but it creates the impression of the exact opposite.
At the same time, activists and lobbyists skillfully manage to make every dip in a trend appear to be the end of the world, even if the general trend is clearly improving, scaring us with alarmist exaggerations and prophecies. For example, in the United States, the violent-crime rate has been on a downward trend since Just under By that figure was well under 9. Each time something horrific or shocking happened, which was pretty much every year, a crisis was reported.
The majority of people, the vast majority of the time, believe that violent crime is getting worse. No wonder we get an illusion of constant deterioration. The news constantly alerts us to bad events in the present.
The doom-laden feeling that this creates in us is then intensified by our inability to remember the past; our historical knowledge is rosy and pink and we fail to remember that, one year ago, or ten years ago, or 50 years ago, there was the same number of terrible events, probably more.
This illusion of deterioration creates great stress for some people and makes other people lose hope. For no good reason. What are people really thinking when they say the world is getting worse?
My guess is they are not thinking. They are feeling. I agree. Everything is not fine. We should still be very concerned. As long as there are plane crashes, preventable child deaths, endangered species, climate change deniers, male chauvinists, crazy dictators, toxic waste, journalists in prison, and girls not getting an education because of their gender, as long as any such terrible things exist, we cannot relax.
But it is just as ridiculous, and just as stressful, to look away from the progress that has been made. That makes me angry. It means someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason, someone who constantly resists the overdramatic worldview. As a possibilist, I see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible.
This is not optimistic. It is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful. When people wrongly believe that nothing is improving, they may conclude that nothing we have tried so far is working and lose confidence in measures that actually work.
I meet many such people, who tell me they have lost all hope for humanity. Or, they may become radicals, supporting drastic measures that are counter-productive when, in fact, the methods we are already using to improve our world are working just fine. When women are educated, all kinds of wonderful things happen in societies. The workforce becomes diversified and able to make better decisions and solve more problems. Educated mothers decide to have fewer children and more children survive.
But since there has been fantastic progress. Across religions, cultures, and continents, almost all parents can now afford to send all their children to school, and are sending their daughters as well as their sons. Now the girls have almost caught up: 90 percent of girls of primary school age attend school. For boys, the figure is 92 percent.
I see no conflict between celebrating this progress and continuing to fight for more. I am a possibilist. The loss of hope is probably the most devastating consequence of the negativity instinct and the ignorance it causes. How to Control the Negativity Instinct How can we help our brains to realize that things are getting better when everything is screaming at us that things are getting worse?
Bad and Better The solution is not to balance out all the negative news with more positive news. That would just risk creating a self-deceiving, comforting, misleading bias in the other direction. It would be as helpful as balancing too much sugar with too much salt.
It would make things more exciting, but maybe even less healthy. A solution that works for me is to persuade myself to keep two thoughts in my head at the same time. I am certainly not advocating looking away from the terrible problems in the world. I am saying that things can be both bad and better. Think of the world as a premature baby in an incubator.
After a week, she is getting a lot better. On all the main measures, she is improving, but she still has to stay in the incubator because her health is still critical. Does it make sense to say it is bad? Yes, absolutely. No, not at all. Is it helpful to have to choose between bad and improving?
Definitely not. Better, and bad, at the same time. That is how we must think about the current state of the world. Expect Bad News Something else that helps to control the negativity instinct is to constantly expect bad news. Remember that the media and activists rely on drama to grab your attention. Remember that negative stories are more dramatic than neutral or positive ones. Remember how simple it is to construct a story of crisis from a temporary dip pulled out of its context of a long-term improvement.
Remember that we live in a connected and transparent world where reporting about suffering is better than it has ever been before. When you hear about something terrible, calm yourself by asking, If there had been an equally large positive improvement, would I have heard about that? Even if there had been hundreds of larger improvements, would I have heard? You need to find them. And if you look in the statistics, they are everywhere.
This reminder will give you the basic protection to allow you, and your children, to keep watching the news without being carried away into dystopia on a daily basis. The evidence about the terrible past is scary, but it is a great resource. It can help us to appreciate what we have today and provide us with hope that future generations will, as previous generations did, get over the dips and continue the long-term trends toward peace, prosperity, and solutions to our global problems.
I Would Like to Thank … Society Struggling for breath in that ditch full of pee 65 years ago in a working-class suburb in Sweden, little did I know that I would be the first in my family to go to university. I had to learn them. The only way anyone can know about different causes of death and how they are changing, for example, is to keep track of every death and its cause, write them down, and then add them up.
It was a common type of accident for a child under five living on Level 3. All I knew was that I was stuck. My grandmother came to the rescue and lifted me up. And then Swedish society lifted me further. During my lifetime, Sweden moved from Level 3 to Level 4. A treatment against tuberculosis was invented and my mother got well. She read books to me that she borrowed from the public library.
For free. I became the first in my family to get more than six years of education, and I went to university for free. Of course nothing is free: the taxpayers paid. My survival and success in life have always depended on others.
Thanks to my family, free education, and free health care, I made it all the way from that ditch to the World Economic Forum. I would never have made it on my own. Today, now that Sweden is on Level 4, only three children in 1, die before the age of five, and only 1 percent of those deaths are drownings.
Fences, day care, life-jacket campaigns, swimming lessons, and lifeguards at public pools all cost money. Child death from drowning is one of the many horrors that has nearly disappeared as the country has become richer. That is what I call progress. The same improvements are taking place across the world today.
Most countries are currently improving faster than Sweden ever did. Much faster. Factfulness Factfulness is … recognizing when we get negative news, and remembering that information about bad events is much more likely to reach us. This gives us a systematically too-negative impression of the world around us, which is very stressful. To control the negativity instinct, expect bad news. Practice distinguishing between a level e. Convince yourself that things can be both better and bad.
Good news is almost never reported. So news is almost always bad. When you see bad news, ask whether equally positive news would have reached you. When a trend is gradually improving, with periodic dips, you are more likely to notice the dips than the overall improvement. More bad news is sometimes due to better surveillance of suffering, not a worsening world.
People often glorify their early experiences, and nations often glorify their histories. On September 23, , I was sitting at my desk in the Gapminder office in Stockholm when I saw a line on a graph that gripped me with fear. I had been concerned about the Ebola outbreak in West Africa since August. Like others, I had seen the tragic images in the media of people dying in the streets of Monrovia, the capital of Liberia.
But in my work, I often heard about sudden outbreaks of deadly diseases, and I had assumed it was like most others and would soon be contained. The graph in the World Health Organization research article shocked me into fear and then action.
The researchers had collected all the Ebola data since the start of the epidemic and used it to calculate the expected number of new cases per day up to the end of October. They showed, for the first time, that the number of cases was not just increasing along a straight line: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Instead, the number was doubling like this: 1, 2, 4, 8, Each infected person was infecting, on average, two more people before dying.
The graph showed how enormous the outbreak would soon become if each infected person kept infecting two more. Doubling is scary! I had first learned about the effect of doubling at school. In the Indian legend, the Lord Krishna asks for one grain of rice on the first square of the chessboard, then two grains on the second square, four grains on the third square, then eight, and so on, doubling the number of grains each time.
By the time he gets to the last of the 64 squares, he is owed 18,,,,,, grains of rice: enough to cover the whole of India with a layer of rice 30 inches deep. Anything that keeps doubling grows much faster than we first assume. So I knew the situation in West Africa was about to become desperate. Liberia was at risk of a catastrophe worse than its recently ended civil war, and one that would almost inevitably spread to the entire world.
Unlike malaria, Ebola could spread quickly in all climates and could travel on airplanes, across borders and oceans inside the bodies of unknowingly infected passengers.
There was no effective treatment for it. People were already dying in the streets now. Within only nine weeks the time needed for three doublings the situation would be eight times as desperate. Every three-week delay in dealing with the problem would mean twice as many people infected and twice as many resources needed.
Ebola had to be stopped within weeks. At Gapminder we immediately changed our priorities and started studying the data and producing information videos to explain the urgency of the situation. By October 20, I had canceled all my assignments for the next three months and was on a plane to Liberia, where I hoped my 20 years of studying epidemics in rural sub-Saharan Africa could be of some use. Like the rest of the world, I was too slow to understand the magnitude and urgency of the Ebola crisis.
I had assumed that the increase in cases was a straight line when in fact the data clearly showed that it was a doubling line. Once I understood this, I acted. But I wish I had understood, and acted, sooner. One of the most important numbers of the sustainability equation is the human population. There must be some kind of limit to how many people can live on this planet. So when I started testing my audiences at these sustainability conferences, I just assumed that they would know the basic facts about global population growth.
Seldom have I been so wrong. We have now arrived at the third instinct—the straight line instinct—and the third and last mega misconception: the false idea that the world population is just increasing. This word is the misconception. In fact, the world population is increasing. Very fast. Roughly a billion people will be added over the next 13 years. They reveal the ten instincts that distort our perspective—from our tendency to divide the world into two camps usually some version of us and them to the way we consume media where fear rules to how we perceive progress believing that most things are getting worse.
It turns out that the world, for all its imperfections, is in a much better state than we might think. But when we worry about everything all the time instead of embracing a worldview based on facts, we can lose our ability to focus on the things that threaten us most.
Inspiring and revelatory, filled with lively anecdotes and moving stories, Factfulness is an urgent and essential book that will change the way you see the world and empower you to respond to the crises and opportunities of the future. Previously I armed myself with huge data sets, eye-opening software, an energetic learning style and a Swedish bayonet for sword-swallowing.
We hope that you find this book interesting. Moreover Technolily. If you feel that we have violated your copyrights, then please contact us immediately. Many documents and forms are offered in PDF file because a PDF document on any platform and within each programme the same is shown.
A major drawback of PDF is that it is a browser window with ads will open each time you use the program. Here is only to escape by a small amount to pay. There are other free PDF programs that have the same functions, and the user is not bothered with advertisements. You can use these other programs found in our overview of free PDF software.
You can free download PDF and safe install the latest trial or new full version for Windows 10 x32, 64 bit, 86 from the official site.
We have the world's best book summaries. Free PDF download.
0コメント