by Hans Rosling
LEVEL 3. Wow! You did it! You work multiple jobs, 16 hours a day, seven days a week, and manage to quadruple your income again, to $16 a day. Your savings are impressive and you install a cold-water tap. No more fetching water. With a stable electric line the kids’ homework improves and you can buy a fridge that lets you store food and serve different dishes each day. You save to buy a motorcycle, which means you can travel to a better-paying job at a factory in town. Unfortunately you crash on your way there one day and you have to use money you had saved for your children’s education to pay the medical bills. You recover, and thanks to your savings you are not thrown back a level. Two of your children start high school. If they manage to finish, they will be able to get better-paying jobs than you have ever had. To celebrate, you take the whole family on its first-ever vacation, one afternoon to the beach, just for fun. (Roughly 2 billion people live like this today.)
LEVEL 4. You have more than $64 a day. You are a rich consumer and three more dollars a day makes very little difference to your everyday life. That’s why you think three dollars, which can change the life of someone living in extreme poverty, is not a lot of money. You have more than twelve years of education and you have been on an airplane on vacation. You can eat out once a month and you can buy a car. Of course you have hot and cold water indoors.
But you know about this level already. Since you are reading this book, I’m pretty sure you live on Level 4. I don’t have to describe it for you to understand. The difficulty, when you have always known this high level of income, is to understand the huge differences between the other three levels. People on Level 4 must struggle hard not to misunderstand the reality of the other 6 billion people in the world. (Roughly 1 billion people live like this today.)
I’ve described the progress up the levels as if one person managed to move through several levels. That is very unusual. Often it takes several generations for a family to move from Level 1 to Level 4. I hope though that you now have a clear picture of the kinds of lives people live on different levels; a sense that it is possible to move through the levels, both for individuals and for countries; and above all the understanding that there are not just two kinds of lives.
Human history started with everyone on Level 1. For more than 100,000 years nobody made it up the levels and most children didn’t survive to become parents. Just 200 years ago, 85 percent of the world population was still on Level 1, in extreme poverty.
Today the vast majority of people are spread out in the middle, across Levels 2 and 3, with the same range of standards of living as people had in Western Europe and North America in the 1950s. And this has been the case for many years.
The Gap Instinct
The gap instinct is very strong. The first time I lectured to the staff of the World Bank was in 1999. I told them the labels “developing” and “developed” were no longer valid and I swallowed my sword. It took the World Bank 17 years and 14 more of my lectures before it finally announced publicly that it was dropping the terms “developing” and “developed” and would from now on divide the world into four income groups. The UN and most other global organizations have still not made this change.
So why is the misconception of a gap between the rich and the poor so hard to change?
I think this is because human beings have a strong dramatic instinct toward binary thinking, a basic urge to divide things into two distinct groups, with nothing but an empty gap in between. We love to dichotomize. Good versus bad. Heroes versus villains. My country versus the rest. Dividing the world into two distinct sides is simple and intuitive, and also dramatic because it implies conflict, and we do it without thinking, all the time.
Journalists know this. They set up their narratives as conflicts between two opposing people, views, or groups. They prefer stories of extreme poverty and billionaires to stories about the vast majority of people slowly dragging themselves toward better lives. Journalists are storytellers. So are people who produce documentaries and movies. Documentaries pit the fragile individual against the big, evil corporation. Blockbuster movies usually feature good fighting evil.
The gap instinct makes us imagine division where there is just a smooth range, difference where there is convergence, and conflict where there is agreement. It is the first instinct on our list because it’s so common and distorts the data so fundamentally. If you look at the news or click on a lobby group’s website this evening, you will probably notice stories about conflict between two groups, or phrases like “the increasing gap.”
How to Control the Gap Instinct
There are three common warning signs that someone might be telling you (or you might be telling yourself) an overdramatic gap story and triggering your gap instinct. Let’s call them comparisons of averages, comparisons of extremes, and the view from up here.
Comparisons of Averages
All you averages out there, please do not take offense at what I am about to say. I love averages. They are a quick way to convey information, they often tell us something useful, and modern societies couldn’t function without them. Nor could this book. There will be many averages in this book. But any simplification of information may also be misleading, and averages are no exception. Averages mislead by hiding a spread (a range of different numbers) in a single number.
When we compare two averages, we risk misleading ourselves even more by focusing on the gap between those two single numbers, and missing the overlapping spreads, the overlapping ranges of numbers, that make up each average. That is, we see gaps that are not really there.
Look at the two (unrelated) graphs here, for example:
The graph on the left shows the gap between the average math scores of men and women taking SAT tests in the United States, for every year since 1965. The graph on the right shows the gap between the average income of people living in Mexico and the United States. Look at the huge differences between the two lines in each graph. Men versus women. United States versus Mexico. These graphs seem to show that men are better at math than women, and that people living in the United States have a higher income than Mexicans. And in a sense this is true. It is what the numbers say. But in what sense? To what extent? Are all men better than all women? Are all US citizens richer than all Mexicans?
Let’s get a better sense of the reality behind the numbers. First, let’s change the scale on the vertical axis. Using the same numbers, we now get a very different impression. Now the “gap” seems almost gone.
Now let’s look at the same data in a third way. Instead of looking at the averages each year, let’s look at the range of math scores, or incomes, in one particular year.
Now we get a sense of all the individuals who were bundled into the average number. Look! There is an almost complete overlap between men and women’s math scores. The majority of women have a male math twin: a man with the same math score as they do. When it comes to incomes in Mexico and the United States, the overlap is there but it is only partial. What is clear, though, looking at the data this way, is that the two groups of people—men and women, Mexicans and people living in the United States—are not separate at all. They overlap. There is no gap.
Of course, gap stories can reflect reality. In apartheid South Africa, black people and white people lived on different income levels and there was a true gap between them, with almost no overlap. The gap story of separate groups was absolutely relevant.
But apartheid was very unusual. Much more often, gap stories are a misleading overdramatization. In most cases there is no clear separation of two groups, even if it seems like that from the averages. We almost always get a more accurate picture by digging a little deeper and looking not just at the averages but at the spread: not just the group all bundled together, but the individuals. Then we often see that apparently distinct groups are in fact very much overlapping.
Comparisons of Extremes
We are naturally drawn to extreme examples, and they are easy to recall. For example, if we are thinking abo
ut global inequality we might think about the stories we have seen on the news about famine in South Sudan, on the one hand, and our own comfortable reality on the other. If we are asked to think about different kinds of government systems, we might quickly recall on the one hand corrupt, oppressive dictatorships and on the other hand countries like Sweden, with great welfare systems and benevolent bureaucrats dedicating their lives to safeguarding the rights of all citizens.
These stories of opposites are engaging and provocative and tempting—and very effective for triggering our gap instinct—but they rarely help understanding. There will always be the richest and the poorest, there will always be the worst regimes and the best. But the fact that extremes exist doesn’t tell us much. The majority is usually to be found in the middle, and it tells a very different story.
Take Brazil, one of the world’s most unequal countries. The richest 10 percent in Brazil earns 41 percent of the total income. Disturbing, right? It sounds too high. We quickly imagine an elite stealing resources from all the rest. The media support that impression with images of the very richest—often not the richest 10 percent but probably the richest 0.1 percent, the ultra-rich—and their boats, horses, and huge mansions.
Yes, the number is disturbingly high. At the same time, it hasn’t been this low for many years.
Statistics are often used in dramatic ways for political purposes, but it’s important that they also help us navigate reality. Let’s now look at the incomes of the Brazilian population across the four levels.
Most people in Brazil have left extreme poverty. The big hump is on Level 3. That’s where you get a motorbike and reading glasses, and save money in a bank to pay for high school and someday buy a washing machine. In reality, even in one of the world’s most unequal countries, there is no gap. Most people are in the middle.
The View from Up Here
As I mentioned, if you are reading this book you probably live on Level 4. Even if you live in a middle-income country, meaning the average income is on Level 2 or 3—like Mexico, for example—you yourself probably live on Level 4 and your life is probably similar in important ways to the lives of the people living on Level 4 in San Francisco, Stockholm, Rio, Cape Town, and Beijing. The thing known as poverty in your country is different from “extreme poverty.” It’s “relative poverty.” In the United States, for example, people are classified as below the poverty line even if they live on Level 3.
So the struggles people go through on Levels 1, 2, and 3 will most likely be completely unfamiliar to you. And they are not described in any helpful way in the mass media you consume.1
Your most important challenge in developing a fact-based worldview is to realize that most of your firsthand experiences are from Level 4; and that your secondhand experiences are filtered through the mass media, which loves nonrepresentative extraordinary events and shuns normality.
When you live on Level 4, everyone on Levels 3, 2, and 1 can look equally poor, and the word poor can lose any specific meaning. Even a person on Level 4 can appear poor: maybe the paint on their walls is peeling, or maybe they are driving a used car. Anyone who has looked down from the top of a tall building knows that it is difficult to assess from there the differences in height of the buildings nearer the ground. They all look kind of small. In the same way, it is natural for people living on Level 4 to see the world as divided into just two categories: rich (at the top of the building, like you) and poor (down there, not like you). It is natural to look down and say “oh, they are all poor.” It is natural to miss the distinctions between the people with cars, the people with motorbikes and bicycles, the people with sandals, and the people with no shoes at all.
I assure you, because I have met and talked with people who live on every level, that for the people living on the ground on Levels 1, 2, and 3, the distinctions are crucial. People living in extreme poverty on Level 1 know very well how much better life would be if they could move from $1 a day to $4 a day, not to mention $16 a day. People who have to walk everywhere on bare feet know how a bicycle would save them tons of time and effort and speed them to the market in town, and to better health and wealth.
The four-level framework, the replacement for the overdramatic “divided” worldview, is the first and most important part of the fact-based framework you will learn in this book. Now you have learned it. It isn’t too difficult, is it? I will use the four levels throughout the rest of the book to explain all kinds of things, including elevators, drownings, sex, cookery, and rhinos. They will help you to see the world more clearly and get it right more often.
What do you need to hunt, capture, and replace misconceptions? Data. You have to show the data and describe the reality behind it. So thank you, UNICEF data tables, thank you, bubble graphs, and thank you, internet. But you also need something more. Misconceptions disappear only if there is some equally simple but more relevant way of thinking to replace them. That’s what the four levels do.
Factfulness
Factfulness is … recognizing when a story talks about a gap, and remembering that this paints a picture of two separate groups, with a gap in between. The reality is often not polarized at all. Usually the majority is right there in the middle, where the gap is supposed to be.
To control the gap instinct, look for the majority.
• Beware comparisons of averages. If you could check the spreads you would probably find they overlap. There is probably no gap at all.
• Beware comparisons of extremes. In all groups, of countries or people, there are some at the top and some at the bottom. The difference is sometimes extremely unfair. But even then the majority is usually somewhere in between, right where the gap is supposed to be.
• The view from up here. Remember, looking down from above distorts the view. Everything else looks equally short, but it’s not.
CHAPTER TWO
THE NEGATIVITY INSTINCT
How I was kind of born in Egypt, and what a baby in an incubator can teach us about the world
Which statement do you agree with most?
A: The world is getting better.
B: The world is getting worse.
C: The world is getting neither better nor worse.
Getting Out of the Ditch
I remember being suddenly upside down. I remember the dark, the smell of urine, and being unable to breathe as my mouth and nostrils filled with mud. I remember struggling to turn myself upright but only sinking deeper into the sticky liquid. I remember my arms, stretched out behind me, desperately searching the grass for something to pull, then being suddenly hauled out by the ankles. My grandma putting me in the big sink on the kitchen floor and washing me gently, with the hot water meant for the dishes. The scent of the soap.
These are my earliest memories and were nearly my last. They are memories of my rescue, aged four, from the sewage ditch running in front of my grandma’s house. It was filled to the brim with a mix of last night’s rain and sewage slurry from the factory workers’ township. Something in it had caught my attention, and stepping to the ditch’s edge, I had slipped and fallen in headfirst. My parents were not around to keep an eye on me. My mother was in the hospital, ill with tuberculosis. My father worked ten hours a day.
During the week, I lived with my grandparents. On Saturdays my daddy put me on the rack of his bike and we drove in large circles and figures of eight just for fun on our way to the hospital. I would see Mommy standing on the balcony on the third floor coughing. Daddy would explain that if we went in we could get sick too. I would wave to her and she would wave back. I saw her talking to me, but her voice was too weak and her words were carried away by the wind. I remember that she always tried to smile.
The Mega Misconception That “The World Is Getting Worse”
This chapter is about the negativity instinct: our tendency to notice the bad more than the good. This instinct is behind the second mega misconception.
“Things are getting worse” is the statement about the w
orld that I hear more than any other. And it is absolutely true that there are many bad things in this world.
The number of war fatalities has been falling since the Second World War, but with the Syrian war, the trend has reversed. Terrorism too is rising again. (We’ll get back to that in chapter 4.)
Overfishing and the deterioration of the seas are truly worrisome. The lists of dead areas in the world’s oceans and of endangered species are getting longer.
Ice is melting. Sea levels will continue to rise by probably three feet over the next 100 years. There’s no doubt it’s because of all the greenhouse gases humans have pumped into the atmosphere, which won’t disperse for a long time, even if we stop adding more.
The collapse of the US housing market in 2007, which no regulators had predicted, was caused by widespread illusions of safety in abstract investments, which hardly anyone understood. The system remains as complex now as it was then and a similar crisis could happen again. Maybe tomorrow.
In order for this planet to have financial stability, peace, and protected natural resources, there’s one thing we can’t do without, and that’s international collaboration, based on a shared and fact-based understanding of the world. The current lack of knowledge about the world is therefore the most concerning problem of all.
I hear so many negative things all the time. Maybe you think, “Hans, you must just meet all the gloomiest people.” We decided to check.
