by Hans Rosling
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.
Feeling, Not Thinking
There’s something else going on as well. What are people really thinking when they say the world is getting worse? My guess is they are not thinking. They are feeling. If you still feel uncomfortable agreeing that the world is getting better, even after I have shown you all this beautiful data, my guess is that it’s because you know that huge problems still remain. My guess is you feel that me saying that the world is getting better is like me telling you that everything is fine, or that you should look away from these problems and pretend they don’t exist: and that feels ridiculous, and stressful.
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. People often call me an optimist, because I show them the enormous progress they didn’t know about. That makes me angry. I’m not an optimist. That makes me sound naïve. I’m a very serious “possibilist.” That’s something I made up. 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.
Take, for example, girls’ education. Educating girls has proven to be one of the world’s best-ever ideas. 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. More energy and time is invested in each child’s education. It’s a virtuous cycle of change.
Poor parents who can’t afford to send all their children to school have often prioritized the boys. But since 1970 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. There’s almost no difference.
There are still gender differences when it comes to education on Level 1, especially when it comes to secondary and higher education, but that’s no reason to deny the progress that has been made. I see no conflict between celebrating this progress and continuing to fight for more. I am a possibilist. And the progress we have made tells me it’s possible to get all girls in school, and all boys too, and that we should work hard to make it happen. It won’t happen by itself, and if we lose hope because of stupid misconceptions, it might not happen at all. 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.
It seems that when we hear someone say things are getting better, we think they are also saying “don’t worry, relax” or even “look away.” But when I say things are getting better, I am not saying those things at all. 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. The baby’s health status is extremely bad and her breathing, heart rate, and other important signs are tracked constantly so that changes for better or worse can quickly be seen. 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 that the infant’s situation is improving? Yes. Absolutely. Does it make sense to say it is bad? Yes, absolutely. Does saying “things are improving” imply that everything is fine, and we should all relax and not worry? No, not at all. Is it helpful to have to choose between bad and improving? Definitely not. It’s both. It’s both bad and better. 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? Would I ever hear about children who don’t drown? Can I see a decrease in child drownings, or in deaths from tuberculosis, out my window, or on the news, or in a charity’s publicity material? Keep in mind that the positive changes may be more common, but they don’t find you. 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.
Don’t Censor History
When we hang on to a rose-tinted version of history we deprive ourselves and our children of the truth. 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. Little did I know that I would become a global health professor and travel to Davos and tell the world’s experts that they knew less about basic global trends than chimpanzees.
I didn’t know any basic global trends myself back then, of course. I had to learn them. The only way anyone can know about different causes of death and how they are changing, for exampl
e, is to keep track of every death and its cause, write them down, and then add them up. That’s extremely time-consuming. There’s only one such data set in the whole world. It’s named the Global Burden of Disease, and when I consulted it many years later it showed me that my near-death experience was not so special. 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. I got a doctor’s degree for free. Of course nothing is free: the taxpayers paid. And then, at the age of 30, when I had become a father of two and I discovered my first cancer, I was treated and cured by the world’s best health-care system, for free. 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 1,000 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. When things are getting better we often don’t hear about them. 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.
• Better and bad. Practice distinguishing between a level (e.g., bad) and a direction of change (e.g., better). Convince yourself that things can be both better and bad.
• Good news is not news. 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.
• Gradual improvement is not news. When a trend is gradually improving, with periodic dips, you are more likely to notice the dips than the overall improvement.
• More news does not equal more suffering. More bad news is sometimes due to better surveillance of suffering, not a worsening world.
• Beware of rosy pasts. People often glorify their early experiences, and nations often glorify their histories.
CHAPTER THREE
THE STRAIGHT LINE INSTINCT
How more survivors means fewer people, how traffic accidents are like cavities, and why my grandson is like the population of the world
The Most Frightening Graph I Ever Saw
Statistics can be terrifying. On September 23, 2014, 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, 16. Each infected person was infecting, on average, two more people before dying. As a result, the number of new cases per day was doubling every three weeks. 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 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 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. I remained in Liberia for three months, missing Christmas and New Year’s with my family for the first time ever.
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.
The Mega Misconception That “The World Population Is Just Increasing and Increasing”
Nowadays, the word sustainability is found in the title of almost every conference I get invited to. 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. Right? 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. Please pay attention to the word just, which I’ve made italic and underlined for a purpose. 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. That’s true. That’s not a misconception. But it’s not just increasing. The “just” implies that, if nothing is done, the population will just keep on growing. It implies that some drastic action is needed in order to stop the growth. That is the misconception, and I think it is based on the same instinct that stopped me and the world from acting sooner to stop Ebola. The instinct to assume that lines are straight.
I rarely get speechless, but it happened the first time I asked an audience the following question. It was at a teachers’ conference in Norway (but I don’t mean to be too hard on the Norwegians: it might just as well have been in Finland too). Many of these teachers were teaching global population trends as part of their social science classes. When I turned my head around and saw the results from the live poll on the screen behind me, I couldn’t find words. I remember thinking that there must be something wrong with the polling devices.
; FACT QUESTION 5
There are 2 billion children in the world today, aged 0 to 15 years old. How many children will there be in the year 2100, according to the UN?
Before asking the question, I had told the teachers, “One of these three lines shows the official UN forecast. The other two lines, I just made up.”
Again, chimpanzees pick the correct line 33 percent of the time. The teachers in Norway? Only 9 percent. I was shocked. How could such an important group of people score worse than random? What were they teaching the children?
I kind of hoped the polling devices were broken. But they were not. We got the same terrible results in our public polls. In the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Germany, France, and Australia, 85 percent of people picked the fake lines. (The full country breakdown is in the appendix.)
The experts at the World Economic Forum? They answered much better than the public. Almost as well as chimpanzees. Twenty-six percent got it right.
Thinking it over more calmly after the teachers’ conference was over, I started to see the size of the knowledge problem. The number of future children is the most essential number for making global population forecasts. So it is central to the whole sustainability debate. If we get this number wrong, we are going to get a lot else wrong. Yet almost none of the highly educated and influential people we have measured have the slightest knowledge of what the population experts are all agreeing about. The numbers are freely available online, from the UN website, but free access to data doesn’t turn into knowledge without effort. The UN line is alternative C: the flat line at the bottom. UN experts expect that in the year 2100 there will be 2 billion children, the same number as today. They don’t expect the line to continue straight. They expect no further increase. I’ll soon get back to this.