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

by Hans Rosling

  The number 4.2 million is for 2016. The year before, the number was 4.4 million. The year before that, it was 4.5 million. Back in 1950, it was 14.4 million. That’s almost 10 million more dead babies per year, compared with today. Suddenly this terrible number starts to look smaller. In fact the number has never been lower.

  Of course, I am the first person to wish the number was even lower and falling even faster. But to know how to act, and how to prioritize resources, nothing can be more important than doing the cool-headed math and realizing what works and what doesn’t. And this is clear: more and more deaths are being prevented. We would never realize that without comparing the numbers.

  A Large War

  The Vietnam War was the Syrian war of my generation.

  Two days before Christmas in 1972, seven bombs killed 27 patients and members of staff at the Bach Mai hospital in Hanoi in Vietnam. I was studying medicine in Uppsala in Sweden. We had plenty of medical equipment and yellow blankets. Agneta and I coordinated a collection, which we packed in boxes and sent to Bach Mai.

  Fifteen years later, I was in Vietnam to evaluate a Swedish aid project. One lunchtime, I was eating my rice next to one of my local colleagues, a doctor named Niem, and I asked him about his background. He told me he had been inside the Bach Mai hospital when the bombs fell. Afterward, he had coordinated the unpacking of boxes of supplies that had arrived from all over the world. I asked him if he remembered some yellow blankets and I got goose bumps as he described the fabric’s pattern to me. It felt like we had been friends forever.

  At the weekend, I asked Niem to show me the monument to the Vietnam War. “You mean the ‘Resistance War Against America,’” he said. Of course, I should have realized he wouldn’t call it the Vietnam War. Niem drove me to one of the city’s central parks and showed me a small stone with a brass plate, three feet high. I thought it was a joke. The protests against the Vietnam War had united a generation of activists in the West. It had moved me to send blankets and medical equipment. More than 1.5 million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans had died. Was this how the city commemorated such a catastrophe? Seeing that I was disappointed, Niem drove me to see a bigger monument: a marble stone, 12 feet high, to commemorate independence from French colonial rule. I was still underwhelmed.

  Then Niem asked me if I was ready to see the proper war monument. He drove a little way further, and pointed out of the window. Above the treetops I could see a large pagoda, covered in gold. It seemed about 300 feet high. He said, “Here is where we commemorate our war heroes. Isn’t it beautiful?” This was the monument to Vietnam’s wars with China.

  The wars with China had lasted, on and off, for 2,000 years. The French occupation had lasted 200 years. The “Resistance War Against America” took only 20 years. The sizes of the monuments put things in perfect proportion. It was only by comparing them that I could understand the relative insignificance of “the Vietnam War” to the people who now live in Vietnam.

  Bears and Axes

  Mari Larsson was 38 years old when she was killed by multiple blows to the head from an axe. It was the night of October 17, 2004. Mari’s former partner had broken into her house in the small town of Piteå in the north of Sweden and was waiting for her to come home. The tragic and brutal murder of a mother of three was barely reported in the national media and even the local newspaper gave it only modest coverage.

  That same day a 40-year-old father of three, also living in the far north of Sweden, was killed by a bear while out hunting. His name was Johan Vesterlund and he was the first person killed by a bear in Sweden since 1902. This brutal, tragic, and, crucially, rare event received massive coverage throughout Sweden.

  In Sweden, a fatal bear attack is a once-in-a-century event. Meanwhile, a woman is killed by her partner every 30 days. This is a 1,300-fold difference in magnitude. And yet one more domestic murder had barely registered, while the hunting death was big news.

  Despite what the media coverage might make us think, each death was equally tragic and horrendous. Despite what the media might make us think, people who care about saving lives should be much more concerned about domestic violence than about bears.

  It seems obvious when you compare the numbers.

  Tuberculosis and Swine Flu

  It is not only bears and axes that the news media gets out of proportion.

  In 1918 the Spanish flu killed around 2.7 percent of the world population. The risk of an outbreak of a flu against which we have no vaccine remains a constant threat, which we should all take extremely seriously. In the first months of 2009, thousands of people died from the swine flu. For two weeks it was all over the news. Yet, unlike with Ebola in 2014, the number of cases did not double. It did not even go up in a straight line. I and others concluded this flu was not as aggressive as the first alarm had indicated. But journalists kept the fear boiling for several weeks.

  Finally I got tired of the hysteria and calculated the rate of news reports versus fatalities. Over a period of two weeks, 31 people had died from swine flu, and a news search on Google brought up 253,442 articles about it. That was 8,176 articles per death. Over the same two-week period, I calculated that roughly 63,066 people had died of tuberculosis (TB). Almost all these people were on Levels 1 and 2, where TB remains a major killer even though it can now be treated. But TB is infectious and TB strains can become resistant and kill many people on Level 4. The news coverage for TB was at a rate of 0.1 article per death. Each swine flu death received 82,000 times more attention than each equally tragic death from TB.

  The 80/20 Rule

  It’s so easy to get things out of proportion, but luckily there are also some easy solutions. Whenever I have to compare lots of numbers and work out which are the most important, I use the simplest-ever thinking tool. I look for the largest numbers.

  That is all there is to the 80/20 rule. We tend to assume that all items on a list are equally important, but usually just a few of them are more important than all the others put together. Whether it is causes of death or items in a budget, I simply focus first on understanding those that make up 80 percent of the total. Before I spend time on the smaller ones, I ask myself: Where are the 80 percent? Why are these so big? What are the implications?

  For example, here’s a list of the world’s energy sources, in alphabetical order: biofuels, coal, gas, geothermal, hydro, nuclear, oil, solar, wind. Presented like that, they all seem equally important. If we instead sort them according to how many units of energy they generate for humanity, three outnumber all the rest, as this graph shows.

  To give myself the big picture I would use the 80/20 rule, which tells us that oil+coal+gas give us more than 80 percent of our energy: 87 percent in fact.

  I first discovered how useful the 80/20 rule is when I started to review aid projects for the Swedish government. In most budgets, around 20 percent of the lines sum up to more than 80 percent of the total. You can save a lot of money by making sure you understand these lines first.

  Doing just that is how I discovered that half the aid budget of a small health center in rural Vietnam was about to be spent on 2,000 of the wrong kind of surgical knives. It’s how I discovered that 100 times too much—4 million liters—of baby formula was about to be sent to a refugee camp in Algeria. And it is how I stopped 20,000 testicular prostheses from being sent to a small youth clinic in Nicaragua. In each case I simply looked for the biggest single items taking up 80 percent of the budget, then dug down into any that seemed unusual. In each case the problem was due to a simple confusion or tiny error such as a missing decimal point.

  The 80/20 rule is as easy as it seems. You just have to remember to use it. Here’s one more example.

  The PIN Code of the World

  We can understand the world better, and make better decisions about it, if we know where the biggest proportion of the population lives now and where it will live in the future. Where is the world market? Where are the internet users? Where will tourists come from in th
e future? Where are most of the cargo ships going? And so on.

  FACT QUESTION 8

  There are roughly 7 billion people in the world today. Which map shows best where they live? (Each figure represents 1 billion people.)

  This is one of the fact questions where people score best. They are almost as good as the chimps. Their answers are almost as good as random. By this point in the book, that looks like a great achievement. You see, it all depends on how you compare!

  Seventy percent of people still pick the wrong maps, showing 1 billion people on the wrong continent. Seventy percent of people don’t know that the majority of mankind lives in Asia. If you really care about a sustainable future or the plundering of our planet’s natural resources or the global market, how can you afford to lose track of a billion people?

  The correct map is A. The PIN code of the world is 1-1-1-4. That’s how to remember the map. From left to right, the number of billions, as a PIN code. Americas: 1, Europe: 1, Africa: 1, Asia: 4. (I have rounded the numbers.) Like all PIN codes, this one will change. By the end of this century, the UN expects there to have been almost no change in the Americas and Europe but 3 billion more people in Africa and 1 billion more in Asia. By 2100 the new PIN code of the world will be 1-1-4-5. More than 80 percent of the world’s population will live in Africa and Asia.

  If the UN forecasts for population growth are correct, and if incomes in Asia and Africa keep growing as now, then the center of gravity of the world market will shift over the next 20 years from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. Today, the people living in rich countries around the North Atlantic, who represent 11 percent of the world population, make up 60 percent of the Level 4 consumer market. Already by 2027, if incomes keep growing worldwide as they are doing now, then that figure will have shrunk to 50 percent. By 2040, 60 percent of Level 4 consumers will live outside the West. Yes, I think the Western domination of the world economy will soon be over.

  People in North America and Europe need to understand that most of the world population lives in Asia. In terms of economic muscles “we” are becoming the 20 percent, not the 80 percent. But many of “us” can’t fit these numbers into our nostalgic minds. Not only do we misjudge how big our war monuments should be in Vietnam, we also misjudge our importance in the future global marketplace. Many of us forget to behave properly with those who will control the future trade deals.

  Divide the Numbers

  Often the best thing we can do to make a large number more meaningful is to divide it by a total. In my work, often that total is the total population. When we divide an amount (say, the number of children in Hong Kong) by another amount (say, the number of schools in Hong Kong), we get a rate (children per school in Hong Kong). Amounts are easier to find because they are easier to produce. Somebody just needs to count something. But rates are often more meaningful.

  The Trend Below the Division Line

  I want to return to the 4.2 million dead infants. Earlier in the chapter we compared 4.2 million babies to the 14.4 million who died in 1950. What if fewer children are being born every year and that’s the reason fewer babies are dying? When you see one number falling it is sometimes actually because some other background number is falling. To check, we need to divide the total number of child deaths by the total number of births.

  In 1950, 97 million children were born and 14.4 million children died. To get the child mortality rate, we divide the number of deaths (14.4 million) by the number of births (97 million). That comes out to 15 percent. So in 1950, out of every 100 babies who were born, 15 died before their first birthday.

  Now let’s look at the most recent numbers. In 2016, 141 million children were born and 4.2 million died. Dividing the number of births by the number of deaths comes out to just 3 percent. Out of every 100 babies born across the world, only three die before reaching the age of one. Wow! The infant mortality rate has changed from 15 percent to 3 percent. When we compare rates, rather than amounts of dead children, the most recent number suddenly seems astonishingly low.

  Some people feel ashamed when doing this kind of math with human lives. I feel ashamed when not doing it. A lonely number always makes me suspicious that I will misinterpret it. A number that I have compared and divided can instead fill me with hope.

  Per Person

  “The forecasts show that it is China, India, and the other emerging economies that are increasing their carbon dioxide emissions at a speed that will cause dangerous climate change. In fact, China already emits more CO2 than the USA, and India already emits more than Germany.”

  This outspoken statement came from an environment minister from a European Union country who was part of a panel discussing climate change at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2007. He made his attribution of blame in a neutral tone of voice, as if he were stating a self-evident fact. Had he been watching the faces of the Chinese and Indian panel members he would have realized that his view was not self-evident at all. The Chinese expert looked angry but continued to stare straight ahead. The Indian expert, in contrast, could not sit still. He waved his arm and could barely wait for the moderator’s signal that he could speak.

  He stood up. There was a short silence while he looked into the face of each panel member. His elegant dark blue turban and expensive-looking dark gray suit, and the way he was behaving in his moment of outrage, confirmed his status as one of India’s highest-ranking civil servants with many years’ experience as a lead expert at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. He made a sweeping gesture toward the panel members from the rich nations and then said loudly and accusingly, “It was you, the richest nations, that put us all in this delicate situation. You have been burning increasing amounts of coal and oil for more than a century. You and only you pushed us to the brink of climate change.” Then he suddenly changed posture, put his palms together in an Indian greeting, bowed, and almost whispered in a very kind voice, “But we forgive you, because you did not know what you were doing. We should never blame someone retrospectively for harm they were unaware of.” Then he straightened up and delivered his final remark as a judge giving his verdict, emphasizing each word by slowly moving his raised index finger. “But from now on we count carbon dioxide emission per person.”

  I couldn’t have agreed more. I had for some time been appalled by the systematic blaming of climate change on China and India based on total emissions per nation. It was like claiming that obesity was worse in China than in the United States because the total bodyweight of the Chinese population was higher than that of the US population. Arguing about emissions per nation was pointless when there was such enormous variation in population size. By this logic, Norway, with its population of 5 million, could be emitting almost any amount of carbon dioxide per person.

  In this case, the large numbers—total emissions per nation—needed to be divided by the population of each country to give meaningful and comparable measures. Whether measuring HIV, GDP, mobile phone sales, internet users, or CO2 emissions, a per capita measurement—i.e., a rate per person—will almost always be more meaningful.

  It’s Dangerous Out There

  The safest lives in history are lived today by people on Level 4. Most preventable risks have been eliminated. Still, many walk around feeling worried.

  They worry about all kinds of dangers “out there.” Natural disasters kill so many people, diseases spread, and airplanes crash. They all happen all the time out there, beyond the horizon. It’s a bit strange, isn’t it? Such terrifying things rarely happen “here,” in this safe place where we live. But out there, they seem to happen every day. Remember, though, “out there” is the sum of millions of places, while you live in just one place. Of course more bad things happen out there: out there is much bigger than here. So even if all the places out there were just as safe as your place, hundreds of terrible events would still happen there. If you could keep track of each separate place though, you would be surprised how peaceful most of them were
. Each of them shows up on your screen only on that single day when something terrible happens. All the other days, you don’t hear about them.

  Compare and Divide

  When I see a lonely number in a news report, it always triggers an alarm: What should this lonely number be compared to? What was that number a year ago? Ten years ago? What is it in a comparable country or region? And what should it be divided by? What is the total of which this is a part? What would this be per person? I compare the rates, and only then do I decide whether it really is an important number.

  Factfulness

  Factfulness is … recognizing when a lonely number seems impressive (small or large), and remembering that you could get the opposite impression if it were compared with or divided by some other relevant number.

  To control the size instinct, get things in proportion.

  • Compare. Big numbers always look big. Single numbers on their own are misleading and should make you suspicious. Always look for comparisons. Ideally, divide by something.

  • 80/20. Have you been given a long list? Look for the few largest items and deal with those first. They are quite likely more important than all the others put together.

  • Divide. Amounts and rates can tell very different stories. Rates are more meaningful, especially when comparing between different-sized groups. In particular, look for rates per person when comparing between countries or regions.