How I Learned to Understand the World

by Hans Rosling

  * * *

  By the beginning of 2015, for the first time since June 2014, fewer than one hundred new confirmed cases were reported in one week for Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone together.

  By then, I had returned to the engagements I had put on hold while I went to work on ebola. In January 2015, Agneta and I traveled for a second time to the World Economic Forum in Davos. I was hauling an enormous black suitcase, which was difficult to fit into the luggage compartment on the train.

  I was booked to speak in front of a thousand-strong audience in the plenary hall. The presentations from me and Bill and Melinda Gates were to be the first of the main session on Friday night. Our title was Sustainable Development and the schedule straightforward: Bill and Melinda Gates would be in conversation about “A Vision for the Future” with the CNN news presenter Fareed Zakaria for about thirty minutes. Before the start of their event, I would have fifteen minutes to speak about “Demystifying the Facts.”

  Which is where the black suitcase came in.

  It was full of audience-response devices, one for each member of the audience. Our plan was to find out what the assembled elite knew about the fundamental facts of today’s world. The congress organizers were thrilled. They helped put the devices on the guests’ chairs before the doors opened. We at Gapminder had used these devices before to investigate how much particular groups of people knew, and the results had been remarkably disappointing across many different sectors—bankers, politicians, the media and activists at international organizations. Across the board, my lecture audiences tended toward a world view that was thirty years out of date.

  This time, though, I thought the results would surely be different. Everyone in that hall was a world leader in his or her field. When I walked out on the stage, I spotted Kofi Annan, the former secretary general of the UN, and his wife in the front row.

  I felt quite nervous when I introduced myself.

  “I’m going to start by asking you to answer three questions.”

  The first question came up on the big screen behind me, and then the three multiple choice answers:

  During the last twenty years, the proportion of people living in extreme poverty has … a) Almost doubled; b) Remained about the same; c) Almost halved.

  I watched Kofi Annan as he quickly pressed an answer button. Time for the next question:

  How many of the world’s one-year-olds are vaccinated against measles? a) Two out of every ten; b) Five out of ten; c) Eight out of ten.

  I observed furrowed brows in the hall. My screen showed that the answers were coming in quickly. The technology was working.

  I moved on to my last question, which was about the number of children in the world. To illustrate the number, I showed a line graph. In 1950, there had been fewer than 1 billion children and the number had increased steadily until the beginning of the twenty-first century.

  What would happen next? The audience saw three options shown as dotted lines: the A line was going up to reach 4 billion children by the year 2100; the B line pointed less steeply upward to 3 billion children; the C line was static, i.e. the number of children would still be 2 billion by the end of the twenty-first century.

  This question arguably concerned the world’s most fundamental demographic fact.

  The audience looked uneasy. Kofi Annan leaned closer to his wife to confer with her. The answers came in more slowly than before but finally everybody had replied.

  I showed them how they had done. The question about the proportion of people in extreme poverty had been answered correctly by 61 percent of the Davos delegates—it had been halved in twenty years. Davos delegates had done much better than the Swedish population. Only 23 percent of those polled in Sweden had got the answer right. In the USA, it had been 5 percent.

  Then I looked at the question about measles. It was very much an issue of the moment. Many politicians, public-health experts and pharmaceutical-company bosses were in attendance. Besides, Bill and Melinda would soon be speaking on behalf of their foundation, which funded vaccinations for the world’s poorest children on a grand scale. I had every reason to assume that the majority of these powerful people would be aware of vaccination rates: more than 80 percent of all one-year-olds.

  In fact, only a shockingly low 23 percent of the audience knew the right answer.

  What about the demographic question? The right answer is that the number of children is no longer increasing and looks unlikely to change significantly for the rest of this century. The birth rate has stabilized to 130 million children annually because 80 percent of couples worldwide use contraception and the majority of women have access to abortions.

  So, how many got this right? Only 26 percent, which is still a whole lot better than people in Sweden and the USA, who managed 11 percent and 8 percent respectively.

  I couldn’t resist provoking my audience by mentioning the chimpanzees. If chimps in a zoo are offered a choice of bananas marked A, B, or C, they will, by picking randomly, pick each letter 33 percent of the time. Similarly, a group of people with no idea about the right answers could at least be expected to pick correctly one third of the time, just by guessing. This elite audience, after queuing to attend a seminar on socioeconomic and sustainable development, did worse than chimps would on two out of the three questions.

  Gapminder’s clear, comprehensibly presented data sets have been an amazing success. We have improved the understanding of more than 6 million people every year through discussing our observations in ten TED talks, two BBC documentaries, and many open-access videos and visualization programs. But despite all our efforts to disseminate knowledge, we seemed at best to have had marginal effects on the worldviews of those who were actually meant to know most. This was serious. My questions at Davos were not trivia. They were about fundamental patterns of change in the world.

  What is the most accurate way of describing the proportion of extremely poor people: sharply increasing, more or less unchanging or rapidly decreasing? These are radically different alternatives, comparable to basic road sense: is it right to drive when the light is green or yellow or red?

  To ask what the proportion is of all one-year-olds who have been vaccinated against measles is the equivalent of asking what the proportion is of all children who have access to basic healthcare. Any answer other than 80 percent reveals that you are thirty years behind your time.

  Anyone who does not know that most people have access to contraception and that the total number of children worldwide is no longer increasing has failed to grasp essential demographic facts.

  When I returned to Stockholm, I told Ola and Anna that not even the Davos delegates knew the facts about the world, a world that classed them as very important people. We agreed it was time to change our approach. My conclusion was that we should try to produce better teaching material, but Ola and Anna disagreed. Anna stressed that what we had was already very good. Something else was needed. Perhaps the public and the experts in “the old West” were all psychologically blocked when it came to having a realistic understanding of “the other world.” Our new job had to be to grab people’s attention and make them understand what makes ignorance so persistent.

  A little later, Ola and Anna formulated a concept: “Factfulness.”

  We made it the title of our book and began at once to set out our thoughts.

  Afterword

  by Fanny Härgestam

  “Hans Rosling is going to write a book. Would you like to give him a hand?”

  The question was put to me by the publisher at Natur & Kultur, Richard Herold, who phoned me one evening in December 2016. I took the call standing on a metro platform. The book was not to be just about Hans’s work, as with Factfulness, the book they had already started on. Instead, it would tell the story of his life. The project was urgent, Richard said, explaining that Hans was seriously ill with cancer and might not have much time left. The writing had to be done at speed.

  It soon became clear that H
ans had already begun a memoir. It was a text fragment he had written during the last few months, and it needed reworking and extending.

  A couple of weeks later, Richard and I went to Uppsala and stood waiting outside Hans and Agneta’s door. We had brought a bag of muffins for this first encounter. Maybe the only one. When we pressed the doorbell, I felt nervous. What to expect? Is he bedridden? Will he be able to speak?

  Agneta opened the door and then Hans bustled in, smiling delightedly. He had no problem talking, that much was instantly obvious. We stood inspecting the different objects in the hall for quite a while as Hans enthusiastically told us their stories, one by one.

  Among other things, there was a huge, red wooden clock placed inside a huge, red wooden crib next to two red wooden chairs. The whole arrangement, which took up a lot of space, was an artwork awarded to Hans. The hall was the only space where it would fit.

  By the clock

  * * *

  A map on the wall showed Agneta’s family farm in Vassunda, now turned into a golf course. “You know where it is, don’t you?” he asked and looked at me.

  It was like a little test and it amused Hans. I admitted that my grasp of the local geography of Uppsala County was pretty feeble, but he probably didn’t hear me because he was already on his way into the sitting room while telling us about how he and Agneta had just celebrated fifty years together as a couple.

  “If you are secure in a relationship you are set free to move in space and thought,” he said.

  When they were fourteen, Agneta and Hans were in the same class at school. One of their teachers had pointed out that, statistically, some people in the class would get married to each other. Agneta remembers scanning her classmates and thinking: “Not me, at any rate.” Just a couple of years later, Agneta and Hans met at a New Year celebration—an anything-but-sober party at the Temperance Society in Uppsala. They have been partners ever since.

  Once we were all in the sitting room, Agneta served coffee while Hans handed us copies of his CV, neatly prepared on two sheets of paper stapled together. He clearly wasn’t very willing to speak about his illness and preferred the subject of “the world.”

  He had pulled out the dining table near the seating area to have his laptop close at hand.

  “Watch out, lots of cables everywhere,” he said as he ferreted about under the table with the remote in one hand.

  As dusk gathered around Uppsala, he spoke to the graphs of child mortality, gesticulating in front of the screen with his thin arms. Before I could follow how he did it, the numbers and the graphs were turning into anecdotes. After filling our coffee cups, Hans told us about his time as a young medic working in a hospital in Mozambique in the 1970s. Richard and I listened in silence. He spoke in particular about the hard decisions he had faced and described having to cut unborn babies into pieces to be able to extract them and save the mother’s life. It was extreme poverty that created such impossible dilemmas. He said that working in low-income countries had often frustrated him to the point that he feared he’d go mad. His years of research in Africa had been tough and his workload had sometimes coincided with personal tragedies affecting him and his family. He spoke of seeing mothers lose their children and knowing the pain they suffered because he had felt it, too, when he and Agneta lost their daughter.

  Agneta added to the narrative now and then. It had grown dark outside when the words began to flow more slowly. Suddenly, his voice broke. Tears ran down his cheeks. Agneta wept with him. They were controlled and quiet, sitting closely together on the sofa.

  “It has been a long time since either of us talked about this,” Hans said.

  I got my first email from Hans later that evening. He said he felt somehow re-ignited despite his illness. From then onward, we were in touch by email or phone practically every day. If I went traveling, I took the tape deck and the tapes of our conversations. I always recorded our conversations.

  He sent a photo of himself one afternoon with the caption “Great pose if one wants to come across as fit”: he had been snapped on a cross-country skiing trek.

  Hans seemed healthy and alert at our meetings, which often lasted for hours. Meeting to talk had become part of our routine. We might start in the morning, carry on until a midday break and then speak all afternoon. Hans always sounded eager when he took a call.

  “We’ll start from the beginning,” he often said, when realizing that he had shot off into a discourse that had nothing whatever to do with our main subject.

  While Hans was writing new parts of his memoirs, I worked on the existing text to find passages I would like to reshape or rewrite in greater depth. I always asked him what he thought. He was eager for me to understand him and his background but he also wanted to tell me about how he saw the world.

  “It will be a kind of crash course in world development for you, Fanny,” he used to say. I imagined him smiling contentedly on the other end of the phone as I asked him follow-up questions about vaccine availability or the links between freedom of expression and economic development.

  We discussed the direction of the book many times and at great length. He tended to look for conclusions and argued like the born pedagogue he was, asking questions like: “What will the reader learn by reading this chapter?” For my part, I tried all the time to find out about his past experiences, and how Hans had been affected personally by different events; but it could be tricky to make him focus on a particular moment.

  When he did open up, however, he did so unguardedly, without reservations. He had wept spontaneously that first day we met in Uppsala, just as he later could become emotional when recalling other things that had happened in his past and people he had met.

  Hans worried that his own life and his thoughts on what his social background signified would not add up to anything of sufficient interest. He also worried about time being too short.

  “There are so many stories I’d like to tell,” he often said.

  I tried in vain to persuade him that his first concern was groundless. As for the second one, I shared it—time was short.

  We didn’t make it.

  “I’ll get back to you when I’m in a fit state to talk again,” he wrote in his last text message to me. He died three days later.

  I was able to complete his memoirs mainly because of the hours of interviews with Hans that I had taped in January and early February 2017. I read a lot by Hans’s own hand, all the articles, lecture notes and interview transcripts. To complete the narrative and fill in details of his accounts, I carried out additional interviews with people who knew Hans professionally as well as privately.

  Talking with Agneta was a special part of my preparations for the book. She illustrated her stories by showing me photos from their travels and jobs as well as their day-to-day life together. Hans had been a father and a spouse, sides of him that I learned little about from him, but which, after his death, emerged from the stories told by Agneta and their children.

  * * *

  Agneta and I spent a few days together in the southern province of Skåne in the summer of 2017. We went down to the beach, with its strong winds and warm sand, wrapped in the striped terry-gowns I had seen hung on the wall of the upstairs landing in the small, white-rendered house that had been passed on to Agneta. In the summers, generations of her family have been coming to stay in this traditional cottage.

  The summers are often cool but, regardless, Agneta walks every morning along the narrow path to the sea and—if the water is at least 55 degrees—goes for a swim. She and Hans came here often and, during their last few years together, talked about moving in for good. Hans enjoyed the seaside but, unlike Agneta, wasn’t too keen on getting into the water. He walked to the beach fully dressed, in shirt, trousers, socks, and sandals. This was his favorite activity, to walk along the beach where the sea meets the sand.

  “Still, I got him to swim as far as the jetty over there,” Agneta said, pointing at a small jetty, which one could dive
from, a bit farther along.

  Nearby, a stream wound its way to the sea, making loops in the sand. Small children were playing in the shallow pools.

  Every summer, Hans would set to work to dam the stream. He looked forward to his project, which had no purpose other than keeping him amused. His goal was to change the direction of the stream by building a dam with boulders and sand shoveled on at top speed. He recruited family and strangers alike as stone-carrying slaves. His own task was to plan the new estuary and he would be very pleased if the wind was helpful. On really good days, the wind changed direction so that the stream shifted position naturally.

  Damming the stream in Svarte

  * * *

  Hans had chemotherapy treatment during his last summer but felt reasonably well: a little more breathless than usual but happy to go swimming now and then. The two of them had agreed to live as normally as possible, taking daily walks and starting the day with cheese sandwiches for breakfast in the untamed garden.

  Indoors, there was a desk in every room, ready for Hans to settle down. He usually preferred to write upstairs in a room with a view over the apple trees.

  “He had realized the time to sum up had come. To focus on what had been, rather than what the future might bring,” Agneta said.

  It was something he had not given himself time to do before. The process of “summing up” absorbed him, but Agneta saw to it that he left his desk to move about or come downstairs for meals. If she hadn’t strong-armed him, he would have done neither.

  “He wasn’t always the easiest man to coach,” Agneta said with a smile. She coached him, yes, but she drove herself, too. “I never agreed just to accompany Hans on his travels. My condition was that I would be part of the plan in my own right.”