by Hans Rosling
A: More than doubled
B: Remained about the same
C: Decreased to less than half
This number includes all fatalities from floods, earthquakes, storms, droughts, wildfires, and extreme temperatures, and also deaths during the mass displacement of people and pandemics after such events. Just 10 percent of people picked the right answer, and even in the countries that did best on this question—Finland and Norway—it was only 16 percent. (As always, the full country breakdown is in the appendix.) The chimpanzees, who don’t watch the news, got 33 percent as always! In fact, the number of deaths from acts of nature has dropped far below half. It is now just 25 percent of what it was 100 years ago. The human population increased by 5 billion people over the same period, so the drop in deaths per capita is even more amazing. It has fallen to just 6 percent of what it was 100 years ago.
The reason natural disasters kill so many fewer people today is not that nature has changed. It is that the majority of people no longer live on Level 1. Disasters hit countries on all income levels, but the harm done is very different. With more money comes better preparedness. The graph below shows the average number of deaths from natural disasters per million people over the last 25 years, on each income level.
Thanks to better education, new affordable solutions, and global collaborations, the decrease in death rates is impressive even among those who are stuck on Level 1—as shown in the image on the next page. (We look at averages of 25-year periods because natural disasters don’t occur at an even rate each year. Even so, just one event, the heat wave in Europe in 2003, was largely responsible for the fourfold increase in the death rate on Level 4.)
Back in 1942, Bangladesh was on Level 1 and almost all its citizens were illiterate farmers. Over a two-year period it suffered terrible floods, droughts, and cyclones. No international organization came to the rescue and 2 million people died. Today, Bangladesh is on Level 2. Today, almost all Bangladeshi children finish school, where they learn that three red-and-black flags means everyone must run to the evacuation centers. Today, the government has installed across the country’s huge river delta a digital surveillance system connected to a freely available flood-monitoring website. Just 15 years ago, no country in the world had such an advanced system. When another cyclone hit in 2015, the plan worked and the World Food Programme flew in 113 tons of high-energy biscuits to the 30,000 evacuated families.
In the same year, vivid images spread awareness across the world of the horrific earthquake in Nepal, and rescue teams and helicopters were quickly deployed. Tragically, thousands were already dead, but the humanitarian resources that rushed to this inaccessible country on Level 1 did manage to prevent the death toll from rising even further.
The UN’s ReliefWeb has become a global coordinator for disaster help—something earlier generations of disaster victims could only dream of. And it is paid for by taxpayers on Level 4. We should be very proud of it. We humans have finally figured out how to protect ourselves against nature. The huge reduction in deaths from natural disasters is yet another trend to add to the pile of mankind’s ignored, unknown success stories.
Unfortunately, the people on Level 4 paying for ReliefWeb are the same people we asked about the trend in natural disasters. Ninety-one percent of them are unaware of the success they are paying for because their journalists continue to report every disaster as if it were the worst. The long, elegantly dropping trend line, a bit of fact-based hope, they think is not newsworthy.
Next time the news shows you horrific images of victims trapped under collapsed buildings, will you be able to remember the positive long-term trend? When the journalist turns to the camera and says, “The world just became a bit more dangerous,” will you be able to disagree? To look at the local rescue crew in their colorful helmets and think, “Most of their parents couldn’t read. But these guys are following internationally used first-aid guidelines. The world is getting better.”
When the journalist says with a sad face, “in times like these,” will you smile and think that she is referring to the first time in history when disaster victims get immediate global attention and foreigners send their best helicopters? Will you feel fact-based hope that humanity will be able to prevent even more horrific deaths in the future?
I don’t think so. Not if you function like me. Because when that camera pans to bodies of dead children being pulled out of the debris, my intellectual capacity is blocked by fear and sorrow. At that moment, no line chart in the world can influence my feelings, no facts can comfort me. Claiming in that moment that things are getting better would be to trivialize the immense suffering of those victims and their families. It would be absolutely unethical. In these situations we must forget the big picture and do everything we can to help.
The big facts and the big picture must wait until the danger is over. But then we must dare to establish a fact-based worldview again. We must cool our brains and compare the numbers to make sure our resources are used effectively to stop future suffering. We can’t let fear guide these priorities. Because the risks we fear the most are now often—thanks to our successful international collaboration—the risks that actually cause us the least harm.
For ten days or so in 2015 the world was watching the images from Nepal, where 9,000 people had died. During the same ten days, diarrhea from contaminated drinking water also killed 9,000 children across the world. There were no camera teams around as these children fainted in the arms of their crying parents. No cool helicopters swooped in. Helicopters, anyway, don’t work against this child killer (one of the world’s worst). All that’s needed to stop a child from accidentally drinking her neighbor’s still-lukewarm poo is a few plastic pipes, a water pump, some soap, and a basic sewage system. Much cheaper than a helicopter.
40 Million Invisible Planes
In 2016 a total of 40 million commercial passenger flights landed safely at their destinations. Only ten ended in fatal accidents. Of course, those were the ones the journalists wrote about: 0.000025 percent of the total. Safe flights are not newsworthy. Imagine:
“Flight BA0016 from Sydney arrived in Singapore Changi airport without any problems. And that was today’s news.”
2016 was the second safest year in aviation history. That is not newsworthy either.
This graph shows plane crash deaths per 10 billion commercial passenger miles over the last 70 years. Flying has gotten 2,100 times safer.
Back in the 1930s, flying was really dangerous and passengers were scared away by the many accidents. Flight authorities across the world had understood the potential of commercial passenger air traffic, but they also realized flying had to become safer before most people would dare to try it. In 1944 they all met in Chicago to agree on common rules and signed a contract with a very important Annex 13: a common form for incident reports, which they agreed to share, so they could all learn from each other’s mistakes.
Since then, every crash or incident involving a commercial passenger airplane has been investigated and reported; risk factors have been systematically identified; and improved safety procedures have been adopted, worldwide. Wow! I’d say the Chicago Convention is one of humanity’s most impressive collaborations ever. It’s amazing how well people can work together when they share the same fears.
The fear instinct is so strong that it can make people collaborate across the world, to make the greatest progress. It’s so strong it can also remove 40 million noncrashing aircraft from our field of sight each year. Just like it can erase 330,000 child deaths from diarrhea from our TV screens. Just like that.
War and Conflict
I was born in 1948, three years after the end of the Second World War, in which 65 million people died. No one pretended that another world war could not come. And yet, it did not come. Instead came peace: the longest peace between superpowers in human history.
Today, conflicts and fatalities from conflicts are at a record low. I have lived through the most peaceful decad
es in human history. Watching the news, with its never-ending flow of horrifying images, it is almost impossible to believe that.
I do not seek to trivialize the horror that undoubtedly remains. I do not try to understate the importance of ending current conflicts. Remember: things can be bad, and getting better. Getting better, but still bad. The world was once mostly barbaric and it is now mostly not. But for the people of Syria, these trends are of course not comforting. There it is barbaric right now.
The Syrian conflict will most likely prove to be the deadliest in the world since the Ethiopian-Eritrean war of 1998 to 2000. We don’t know the total fatalities yet and we don’t know if the conflict will spread. If fatalities end up being in the tens of thousands, the conflict will have been less bloody than the worst wars of the 1990s. If the death toll reaches 200,000, this will still fall short of the wars of the 1980s. This is no comfort whatsoever to those living through this horror, but the fact that battle deaths are falling decade by decade should be some comfort to the rest of us.
The general trend toward less violence is not just one more improvement. It is the most beautiful trend there is. The spread of peace over the last decades has enabled all the other improvements we have seen. We must take care of this fragile gift if we hope to achieve our other noble goals, such as collaboration toward a sustainable future. Without world peace, you can forget about all other global progress.
Contamination
The threat of a third, nuclear, world war was very real to me during my childhood in the 1950s and throughout the next three decades. It was real to most people. We all had images in our heads of the victims of Hiroshima, and the news showed superpowers flexing their nuclear muscles like bodybuilders on steroids, one test bombing after another. In 1985, the Nobel Peace Prize committee decided that nuclear disarmament was the most important peace cause in the world. They awarded the prize to me. Well, not to me directly, but to IPPNW, the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, and I was a proud member of that organization.
In 1986 there were 64,000 nuclear warheads in the world; today there are 15,000. So the fear instinct can sure help to remove terrible things from the world. On other occasions, it runs out of control, distorts our risk assessment, and causes terrible harm.
Eight miles underwater, on the seafloor of the Pacific Ocean just off the coast of Japan, a “seismic slip-rupture 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. The province was flooded with water and the world’s news was flooded with fear of physical harm and radioactive contamination.
People escaped the province as fast as they could, but 1,600 more people died. It was not the leaking radioactivity that killed them. Not one person has yet been reported as having died from the very thing that people were fleeing from. These 1,600 people died because they escaped. They were mainly old people who died because of the mental and physical stresses of the evacuation itself or of life in evacuation shelters. It wasn’t radioactivity, but the fear of radioactivity, that killed them. (Even after the worst-ever nuclear accident, Chernobyl in 1986, when most people expected a huge increase in the death rate, the WHO investigators could not confirm this, even among those living in the area.)
In the 1940s, a new wonder chemical was discovered that killed many annoying insects. Farmers were so happy. People fighting malaria were so happy. DDT was sprayed over crops, across swamps, and in homes with little investigation of its side effects. DDT’s creator won a Nobel Prize.
During the 1950s the early environmental movement in the United States started to raise concerns about levels of DDT accumulating up the food chain into fish and even birds. The great popular science writer Rachel Carson reported her finding that the shells of bird eggs in her area were becoming thinner in Silent Spring, a book that became a global bestseller. The idea that humans were allowed to spread invisible substances to kill bugs, and authorities were looking away from any signs of the wider impact on other animals or on humans, was of course frightening.
A fear of insufficient regulation and of irresponsible companies was ignited and the global environmental movement was born. Thanks to this movement—and to further contamination scandals involving oil spills, plantation workers disabled by pesticides, nuclear reactor failures—the world today has decent chemical and safety regulations covering many countries (though still not close to the impressive coverage of the aviation industry). DDT was banned in several countries and aid agencies had to stop using it.
But. But. As a side effect, we have been left with a level of public fear of chemical contamination that almost resembles paranoia. It is called chemophobia.
This means that a fact-based understanding of topics like childhood vaccinations, nuclear power, and DDT is still extremely difficult today. The memory of insufficient regulation has created automatic mistrust and fear, which blocks the ability to hear data-driven arguments. I will try anyway.
In a devastating example of critical thinking gone bad, highly educated, deeply caring parents avoid the vaccinations that would protect their children from killer diseases. I love critical thinking and I admire skepticism, but only within a framework that respects the evidence. So if you are skeptical about the measles vaccination, I ask you to do two things. First, make sure you know what it looks like when a child dies from measles. Most children who catch measles recover, but there is still no cure and even with the best modern medicine, one or two in every thousand will die of it. Second, ask yourself, “What kind of evidence would convince me to change my mind?” If the answer is “no evidence could ever change my mind about vaccination,” then you are putting yourself outside evidence-based rationality, outside the very critical thinking that first brought you to this point. In that case, to be consistent in your skepticism about science, next time you have an operation please ask your surgeon not to bother washing her hands.
More than one thousand old people died escaping from a nuclear leak that killed no one. DDT is harmful but I have been unable to find numbers showing that it has directly killed anyone either. The harm investigations that were not done in the 1940s have been done now. In 2002 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention produced a 497-page document named Toxicological Profile for DDT, DDE and DDD. In 2006 the World Health Organization finally finished reviewing all the scientific investigations and, just like the CDC, classified DDT as “mildly harmful” to humans, stating that it had more health benefits than drawbacks in many situations.
DDT should be used with great caution, but there are pros and cons. In refugee camps teeming with mosquitoes, for example, DDT is often one of the quickest and cheapest ways to save lives. Americans, Europeans, and fear-driven lobbyists, though, refuse to read the CDC’s and WHO’s lengthy investigations and short recommendations and are not ready to discuss the use of DDT. Which means some aid organizations that depend on popular support avoid evidence-based solutions that actually would save lives.
Improvements in regulations have been driven not by death rates but by fear, and in some cases—Fukushima, DDT—fear of an invisible substance has run amok and is doing more harm than the substance is itself.
The environment is deteriorating in many parts of the world. But just as dramatic earthquakes receive more news coverage than diarrhea, small but scary chemical contaminations receive more news coverage than more harmful but less dramatic environmental deteriorations, such as the dying seabed and the urgent matter of overfishing.
Chemophobia also means that every six months there is a “new scientific finding” about a synthetic chemical found in regular food in very low quantities that, if you ate a cargo ship or two of it every day for three years, could kill you. At this point, highly educated people put on their worried faces and discuss it over a glass of red wine. The zero-death
toll seems to be of no interest in these discussions. The level of fear seems entirely driven by the “chemical” nature of the invisible substance.
Now let’s move to the latest number one fear in the West.
Terrorism
If there’s one group of people who have fully understood the power of the fear instinct, it’s not journalists. It’s terrorists. The clue is in their name. Fear is what they aim for. And they succeed by tapping into all our primitive fears—of physical harm, of being trapped, of being poisoned or contaminated.
Terrorism is one of the exceptions to the global trends discussed in chapter 2 on negativity. It is getting worse. So are you right to be very scared of it? Well, first of all it accounted for 0.05 percent of all deaths in the world in 2016, so probably not. Second, it depends where you live.
At the University of Maryland in the United States, a group of researchers has collected data about all terror events recorded in reliable media since 1970. The result is the freely available Global Terrorism Database, containing details of 170,000 terror events. This 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. Just like with Ebola, when a number is doubling or tripling, of course we should be worried and look closer to see what it means.
Hunting Terrorism Data
In this part of the book, all the trends finish in 2016 because 2016 is the last year of data in the Global Terrorism Database. The researchers carefully study multiple sources to eliminate rumors and false information for each record they enter, which creates a time delay. That is good scientific practice, but I find it strange. Just like with Ebola, and as with the CO2 emissions I will discuss later, when something seems important and concerning, don’t we need up-to-date data as quickly as possible rather than perfect data? Otherwise how can we know whether terrorism is increasing or not?