Book Recommendation: Factfulness

I recently wrote a recommendation that you read Enlightenment Now, by Steven Pinker. I believed it was one of the best and most important books I’ve read in a long time, and I want to say the same thing about Factfulness, by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, and Anna Rosling Rönnlund.

Just like Pinker, Rosling[1] contends that in almost every important measure, the world is better off than it ever has been in history and continues to improve. But his book is different in several ways, which is why I view it not as a substitute for EN, but as a complement to it, and a highly readable and fascinating one, at that.

Like Pinker, the Roslings provide a lot of surprising material, but they go one better by letting you test yourself, and then compare your performance to thousands of others, and to the documented truth. Chances are, you will be surprised. Here are a couple of examples:[2]

In all low-income countries across the world today, how many girls finish primary school?

A: 20 percent

B: 40 percent

C: 60 percent

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 United Nations?

A: 4 billion

B: 3 billion

C: 2 billion

How did you do? If you gave chimps in the zoo the same tests, they would average 33% correct. But human audiences tend to do much worse, and the errors are invariably skewed toward the pessimistic side.

These tests are important because they clearly illustrate how many misconceptions the general public in the developed world carry about the state of the world. So many of us have a much darker view of what’s happening in the world than is actually going on. Far from going to hell in a handbasket, it’s getting better in most important measures, including health, wealth, education and violence. But most of us get the facts wrong, and often it’s the more highly educated who are the worst.

So why is that a problem? Isn’t it safer and more prudent to be more worried, rather than less? The problem is that being a hypochondriac at the global level contains some of the same risks as at the personal level. We spend too much on unnecessary remedies, some of which have unintended consequences, and not enough on bigger problems. Second, when we really do find something wrong, others may not listen. Third, it can feed an “us v them” mentality which demagogues are quick to hijack for their own purposes.

Factfulness differs from EN in another important way. Whereas Pinker blames our wrong thinking on those who attack the fundamental ideas of reason, science, humanism and progress, Rosling finds the fault in ourselves—more specifically, how our brains work, explaining ten instincts we all have and how we can work around them. These include:

• The gap instinct: we see the world in binary terms, with rich countries and poor, and a large gap between them. In reality, the vast majority of people live in middle income countries.
• The negativity instinct: we notice the bad more than the good, which is a theme I’ve written about before. And because bad events are most likely to make the news, the well-read may be the most wrongly informed.
• The destiny instinct: the idea that our innate characteristics determine our destinies. “They” have always been this way and will never be able to change.

Each instinct is covered in a separate chapter which also contains useful antidotes and work-arounds. For example, to counter the destiny instinct, Rosling suggests the following:

• Keep track of gradual improvements
• Update your knowledge
• Talk to Grandpa
• Collect examples of cultural change

These and all the other suggestions in the book comprise the tools of factfulness, which I inferred from my reading to be the application of critical thinking to the latest reliable data in order to more clearly understand the true state of things. Rosling, of course, has an even better definition; factfulness is “the stress-reducing habit of carrying only the opinions for which you have strong supporting facts”. If you develop the habit, how can you fail to be a persuasive communicator?

Factfulness is not a function of education, as we’ve seen; anyone can develop it. In fact, Rosling tells an amazing and moving story about how an uneducated African woman saved his life by using aspects of factfulness to deliver a speech that dispersed an angry crowd.

Besides being highly informative, Factfulness is very readable, which should come as no surprise to anyone who has seen any of his TED talks or other videos on YouTube. Rosling’s flair for simplifying and illustrating complex topics shows through on every page. If you want to understand the interplay between international finance and preventing malaria, for example the story about the plot to punch the pharma CEO in the face is worth the price of the entire book.

My tagline is “clear thinking, persuasively communicated.” I can’t think of a better representative of that thought than this book.

[1] Although there are three authors, Rosling writes in the first person and is the principal author.

[2] The answer to both is C. Throughout the book, your safest bet is to pick the most favorable answer.