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

The world is a much, much better place than people, particularly Westerners, give it credit for, and in fact, not only is credit withheld, but there is a confidence with which people state that the world is “crumbling.” The world is not only a much, much better place on its own merits than people realize, but certainly, it’s also nearly unimaginably better in comparison to the vast swath of human history and the human experience. Hans Rosling, along with his son, Ola Rosling, and daughter-in-law Anna Rosling Rönnlund, detail the ways in which the world is better than we realize — and the biases that contribute to our distorted, dystopian view of the world — in his last book published posthumously, 2018’s Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World — and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. If you know Hans’ name, then like me, you were likely introduced to him through his famous Ted Talks covering the same issues with engaging graphics. A Swedish physician and professor of international health, Hans made it his mission in life to lecture and educate the world, governments and its people alike, about the “factfulness” of the world. The world has gotten better and continues to get better, and it’s the most undercovered and understated fact about our daily lives.

At the start of the book, Hans quizzes our knowledge about the world with 11 questions. You can even take the quiz yourself here. I believe the one from the book — and I listened on audio, so I couldn’t jot down all the questions — had 11 questions, and I was able to get nine of them correct. It’s not because I just know offhand how many girls finish primary school in all low-income countries across the world, or where the majority of the world population lives. But I tended to err on the side of optimistic, whereas most people err on the side of pessimistic; the default position being that the world is an ugly, bad place. The only question that actually does have a “negative” answer, as it were, is the one about global climate change and the increase of the average temperature over the next 100 years. (I took the quiz on the website, and received a 92 percent, with the average score a 40 percent. I got the world’s population allocation wrong; Africa only has 1 billion people, not 2 billion people.)

Even just take one of the questions from Hans’ quiz and remark upon the fact that most people don’t know it: In the past 20 years, the proportion of the world’s population living in extreme poverty has almost halved. You can’t overstate how remarkable that feat is, with a billion people coming out of extreme poverty. Worldwide, only 7 percent of people get that question right, and here in the United States, it’s 5 percent. Extremely well-educated people get these questions wrong, too, so this isn’t necessarily an issue of education.

More facts the world ought to know: The majority of the world lives in a middle-income country; a majority of girls finish primary school in low-income countries; the life expectancy of the world is 70 years; the number of deaths per year from natural disasters decreased to less than half over the last 100 years (in the early 1900s, there were 181 disaster deaths per million people, and 100 years later, that number was 11); nearly all children in the world have been vaccinated, and specifically, 80 percent of 1-year-old children have been vaccinated against some disease (vaccinations are one of the greatest accomplishments in human history); and for our environmentalists, within my lifetime (back in 1996), tigers, giant pandas, and black rhinos were considered endangered, and today, none of them are; and finally, 80 percent of the world has some access to electricity.

So, let’s start into the 10 reasons, or biases, Hans outlines for why we’re wrong about the world.

1. The Gap Instinct. To think of the world as split between us and them, rich and poor, even developed countries and developing countries, is an outmoded way of conceptualizing the world. That was how we conceived of the world in 1965. It’s the 21st century, and a lot has changed in 59 years, to say the least. As previously mentioned, most people (75 percent) live in middle-income countries, and only 9 percent of the world lives in low-income countries, but even the low-income countries aren’t nearly as bad as people envision. To oversimplify, to live in a low-income country in 2024 is better than living in a low-income country in 1824. In other words, Hans is telling us that to continue seeing the world as us and them is to miss how many people are in the middle and are better off for it.
2. The Negavity Instinct. This one seems axiomatic, given the results of the aforementioned quiz, but it’s worth emphasizing again. Until 1966, extreme poverty was the rule in the world, and today, it is the exception. To put it another way, Hans said the country with the shortest life expectancy today (Lesotho’s life expectancy is 50) is where Sweden was when his grandmother was born. His grandmother, by the way, who didn’t even have a washing machine until later in life (another remarkable Ted Talk). Even those on what Hans calls “level one” in Afghanistan live longer than the Swedes of the early 1800s. One side effect of our progress, Hans says, is that our “surveillance of suffering” has improved dramatically, only adding to our negativity bias. Hans isn’t an optimist, though, he considers himself a “possiblist.” He doesn’t hope or fear without reason.
3. The Straight Line Instinct. This is the instinct where the overpopulation myth resides, i.e., the world’s population will continue to grow and grow in a straight line until it collapses the world’s resources. But it’s actually counterintuitive: The richer the world gets, and the freer women get, the less children women have because a.) we don’t need children to work anymore to support the family’s very survival; and b.) women can choose not to have kids. Hans reminds us, then, that delaying the escape from extreme poverty is what causes an increase in population, not the other way around. (If anything, Western countries are starting to freak out about a decrease in population.)
4. The Fear Instinct. This goes back to the fact about our ability to, uh, weather natural disasters better than ever before. To put that fact another way, deaths from disasters are 6 percent of what they were 100 years ago. 40 million planes land safely each year (rather mind-blowing thinking about the logistics involved!). And of course, the most important fact that begets all of the other important trends (making them possible) is peace. While it doesn’t seem like it when you see Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, or Hamas’ attack on Israel and Israel’s bombardment of Gaza in retaliation or the Syrian civil war before it, fewer people are dying as a result of wars than in most of the 20th century, and if statistics were reliable prior to the 1800s, from then, too. The Fear Instinct has all sorts of unintended consequences, but arguably, one of the most damaging fears in the modern world is chemophobia, the fear of chemicals, leading to anti-vaccine stances, fear of GMOs, and even fear of DDT, which was helping with malaria. Less deleterious to the health of the world, but still bad is what the fear of terrorism did, for example, in the United States, despite the fact that we have a 50x greater risk of dying due to a drunk driver than a terrorist.
5. The Size Instinct. Numbers without context can be misleading. Hans’ example is the outsized fear of the swine flu in 2009 compared to the deaths. Or more simply, one of the quiz questions, how we misunderstand the allocation of the world’s population. He has a helpful way to think about it — the world’s pin code is 1114: one billion people in the Americas; one billion people in Europe; one billion people in Africa; and four billion people in Asia. This is Hans’ way, also, of demonstrating that the people of North America and Western Europe won’t necessarily dominate the world in the future, given population trends.
6. The Generalization Instinct. Because of the previous instincts, we tend to generalize how other parts of the world live. Categorizing people as living in “developing countries” leads us to erroneously generalize people within that category. You can’t generalize a “category”! One of the areas this is most pronounced is assuming what applies to us on what Hans calls “level 4” applies to those who are not living on level 4. Hans uses Africa as a great example of confusing people’s culture for their income level. Even the “majority” as a category could be misleading because a majority could be 51 percent, or it could be 99 percent!
7. The Destiny Instinct. Speaking of culture, categorizing people and confusing culture with income is what leads to the Destiny Instinct: their culture will not allow them to embrace modern society. Most culture change, Hans reminds us, moves too slowly to be noticeable. Slow change is still change. But also, we need to update our knowledge as it goes out of date. African countries, like Nigeria and Kenya, are his prime examples of places that could use our “updated knowledge.”
8. The Single Perspective Instinct. It’s funny for someone who loves using numbers to say this, but it’s also true, Hans reminds us that numbers have their limits and can only tell so much of the story, especially when that story involves human beings. For example, it gets complicated when you realize that South Korea, which progressed quicker than any country ever, did so not as a democracy. China, obviously, where the majority of people have been lifted out of poverty, is also not a democracy. And yet, it is unequivocally a good thing to have people living in those countries lifted out of poverty.
9. The Blame Instinct. Hans thinks we ascribe too much blame (or approbation) to leaders for a country’s progress. To be sure, leaders can stymie progress and are doing so in certain parts of the world. But Hans argues that leaders don’t matter as much as the people do for progress. In other words, progress and the systems that create them are far more complex and dynamic than any one one person or group of people, whether their scapegoated as villains, or venerated as heroes.
10. The Urgency Instinct. This one gets us in trouble. The combination of thinking something is worse than it actually is combined with the Urgency Instinct to do something!! can lead to unintended, calamitous results. We need to watch out for fortune tellers and doomsayers who urge urgent action. Nevertheless, Hans has areas of reasoned concern as we move into the future. His concerns are: 1.) Global pandemic, which is fascinating given one would happen two years after the publication of this book, and he was right to be concerned; 2.) Financial collapse; 3.) World war; 4.) Climate change; 5.) Extreme poverty; and 6.) Unknown risk, because of course, you have to account for something we’re not even thinking about yet that could knock the world’s progress askew.

Overall, I wish everyone everywhere would read Hans’ book, or at least watch a few of his Ted Talks. It should fill us with measured wonder and hope and excitement for the possibilities at how much progress we’ve experienced in a relatively short amount of time as a world. Understanding the world we live in, and how much better it actually is, also ought to better inform how we think about the world and act within the world, as individuals, as citizens, and as governments.