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

by Hans Rosling

  Most of the human-emitted CO2 accumulated in the atmosphere was emitted over the last 50 years by countries that are now on Level 4. Canada’s per capita CO2 emissions are still twice as high as China’s and eight times as high India’s. In fact, do you know how much of all the fossil fuel burned each year is burned by the richest billion? More than half of it. Then the second-richest billion burns half of what’s left, and so on and so on, down to the poorest billion, who are responsible for only 1 percent.

  It will take at least two decades for the poorest billion to struggle from Level 1 to Level 2—increasing their contribution to global CO2 emissions by roughly 2 percent. It will take several decades more for them to get up to Levels 3 and 4.

  In these circumstances, it is a testament to the blame instinct how easily we in the West seem to shift responsibility away from ourselves and onto others. We say that “they” cannot live like us. The right thing to say is, “We cannot live like us.”

  The Foreign Disease

  The body’s largest organ is the skin. Before modern medicine, one of the worst imaginable skin diseases was syphilis, which would start as itchy boils and then eat its way into the bones until it exposed the skeleton. The microbe that caused this disgusting sight and unbearable pain had different names in different places. In Russia it was called the Polish disease. In Poland it was the German disease; in Germany, the French disease; and in France, the Italian disease. The Italians blamed back, calling it the French disease.

  The instinct to find a scapegoat is so core to human nature that it’s hard to imagine the Swedish people calling the open sores the Swedish disease, or the Russians calling it the Russian disease. That’s not how people work. We need someone to blame and if a single foreigner came here with the disease, then we would happily blame a whole country. No further investigation needed.

  Blame and Claim

  The blame instinct drives us to attribute more power and influence to individuals than they deserve, for bad or good. Political leaders and CEOs in particular often claim they are more powerful than they are.

  Powerful Leaders?

  For example, Mao was undoubtedly an extraordinarily powerful figure whose actions had direct consequences for 1 billion people. But his infamous one-child policy had less influence on birth rates than is commonly thought.

  Most often when I show the low birth numbers in Asia, someone says, “That must be because of Mao’s one-child policy.” But the huge, fast drop from six to three babies per woman had happened in the ten years preceding the one-child policy. And during the 36 years the policy was in place, the number never fell below 1.5, though it did in many other countries without enforcement, like Ukraine, Thailand, and South Korea. In Hong Kong, where again the one-child policy didn’t apply, the number dropped even below one baby per woman. All this suggests that there were other factors at play here—the reasons I have already outlined for why women decide to have babies—than the decisive command of a powerful man.

  The pope is also credited with enormous influence over the sexual behavior of the 1 billion Catholics in the world. However, despite the clear condemnation of the use of contraception by several successive popes, the statistics show that contraceptive use is 60 percent in Catholic-majority countries, compared with 58 percent in the rest of the world. In other words, it is the same. The pope is one of the world’s most prominent moral leaders, but it seems that even leaders with great political power or moral authority do not have remote controls that can reach into the bedroom.

  The Inside of Sister Linda’s Door

  In the poorest rural parts of Africa, it is still the nuns who maintain many basic health services. Some of these clever, hardworking, and pragmatic women became my closest colleagues.

  Sister Linda, whom I worked with in Tanzania, was a devout Catholic nun who dressed all in black and prayed three times a day. The door to her office was always open—she closed it only during health-care consultations—and on its outside, the first thing you saw as you entered, was a glossy poster of the pope. One day, she and I were in her office and started discussing a sensitive matter. Sister Linda stood up and closed the door, and for the first time I saw what was on its inside: another large poster and, attached to it, hundreds of little bags of condoms. When Sister Linda turned back around and saw my surprised face she smiled—as she often did when discovering my countless stereotypes of women like her. “The families need them to stop both AIDS and babies,” she said simply. And then she continued our discussion.

  The situation with abortion is different. Mao’s one-child policy did have an impact. It resulted in an unknown number of forced abortions and forced sterilizations. Across the world today, women and girls are still being made the victims of religious condemnation of abortion. When abortion is made illegal it doesn’t stop abortions from happening, but it does make abortions more dangerous and increase the risk of women dying as a result.

  More Likely Suspects

  I have argued above that we should look at the systems instead of looking for someone to blame when things go wrong. We should also give more credit to two kinds of systems when things go right. The invisible actors behind most human success are prosaic and dull compared to great, all-powerful leaders. Nevertheless I want to praise them, so let’s throw a parade for the unsung heroes of global development: institutions and technology.

  Institutions

  Only in a few countries, with exceptionally destructive leaders and conflicts, has social and economic development been halted. Everywhere else, even with the most incapable presidents imaginable, there has been progress. It must make one ask if the leaders are that important. And the answer, probably, is no. It’s the people, the many, who build a society.

  Sometimes, when I turn the water on to wash my face in the morning and warm water comes out just like magic, I silently praise those who made it possible: the plumbers. When I’m in that mode I’m often overwhelmed by the number of opportunities I have to feel grateful to civil servants, nurses, teachers, lawyers, police officers, firefighters, electricians, accountants, and receptionists. These are the people building societies. These are the invisible people working in a web of related services that make up society’s institutions. These are the people we should celebrate when things are going well.

  In 2014, I went to Liberia to help fight Ebola because I was afraid that if it weren’t stopped, it could easily spread to the rest of the world and kill a billion people, causing more harm than any known pandemic in world history. The fight against the lethal Ebola virus was won not by an individual heroic leader, or even by one heroic organization like Médecins Sans Frontières or UNICEF. It was won prosaically and undramatically by government staff and local health workers, who created public health campaigns that changed ancient funeral practices in a matter of days; risked their lives to treat dying patients; and did the cumbersome, dangerous, and delicate work of finding and isolating all the people who had been in contact with them. Brave and patient servants of a functioning society, rarely ever mentioned—but the true saviors of the world.

  Technology

  The Industrial Revolution saved billions of lives not because it produced better leaders but because it produced things like chemical detergents that could run in automatic washing machines.

  I was four years old when I saw my mother load a washing machine for the first time. It was a great day for my mother; she and my father had been saving money for years to be able to buy that machine. Grandma, who had been invited to the inauguration ceremony for the new washing machine, was even more excited. She had been heating water with firewood and hand-washing laundry her whole life. Now she was going to watch electricity do that work. She was so excited that she sat on a chair in front of the machine for the entire washing cycle, mesmerized. To her the machine was a miracle.

  It was a miracle for my mother and me too. It was a magic machine. Because that very day my mother said to me, “Now, Hans, we have loaded the laundry. The machine w
ill do the work. So now we can go to the library.” In went the laundry, and out came books. Thank you industrialization, thank you steel mill, thank you power station, thank you chemical-processing industry, for giving us the time to read books.

  Two billion people today have enough money to use a washing machine and enough time for mothers to read books—because it is almost always the mothers who do the laundry.

  FACT QUESTION 12

  How many people in the world have some access to electricity?

  A: 20 percent

  B: 50 percent

  C: 80 percent

  Electricity is a basic need, which means that the vast majority—almost everyone on Levels 2, 3, and 4—already has it. Still, just one person in four gets the answer right. (The full country breakdown is in the appendix.) The correct answer is the most positive, as usual: 80 percent of people have some access to electricity. It’s unstable and there are often power outages, but the world is getting there. One inauguration after another. Home by home.

  So let’s be realistic about what the 5 billion people in the world who still wash their clothes by hand are hoping for and what they will do everything they can to achieve. Expecting them to voluntarily slow down their economic growth is absolutely unrealistic. They want washing machines, electric lights, decent sewage systems, a fridge to store food, glasses if they have poor eyesight, insulin if they have diabetes, and transport to go on vacation with their families just as much as you and I do.

  Unless you are willing to forgo all these things and start hand-washing your jeans and your bedsheets, why should you expect them to? Instead of finding someone to blame and expecting them to take responsibility, what we need in order to save the planet from the huge risks of climate change is a realistic plan. We must put our efforts into inventing new technologies that will enable 11 billion people to live the life that we should expect all of them to strive for. The life we are living now on Level 4, but with smarter solutions.

  Who Should You Blame?

  It’s not the boss or the board or the shareholders who are to blame for the tragic lack of research into the diseases of the poorest. What do we gain from pointing our fingers at them?

  Similarly, resist the urge to blame the media for lying to you (mostly they are not) or for giving you a skewed worldview (which mostly they are, but often not deliberately). Resist blaming experts for focusing too much on their own interests and specializations or for getting things wrong (which sometimes they do, but often with good intentions). In fact, resist blaming any one individual or group of individuals for anything. Because the problem is that when we identify the bad guy, we are done thinking. And it’s almost always more complicated than that. It’s almost always about multiple interacting causes—a system. If you really want to change the world, you have to understand how it actually works and forget about punching anyone in the face.

  Factfulness

  Factfulness is … recognizing when a scapegoat is being used and remembering that blaming an individual often steals the focus from other possible explanations and blocks our ability to prevent similar problems in the future.

  To control the blame instinct, resist finding a scapegoat.

  • Look for causes, not villains. When something goes wrong don’t look for an individual or a group to blame. Accept that bad things can happen without anyone intending them to. Instead spend your energy on understanding the multiple interacting causes, or system, that created the situation.

  • Look for systems, not heroes. When someone claims to have caused something good, ask whether the outcome might have happened anyway, even if that individual had done nothing. Give the system some credit.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE URGENCY INSTINCT

  How “now or never” can block our roads and our minds

  Roadblocks and Mental Blocks

  “If it’s not contagious, then why did you evacuate your children and wife?” asked the mayor of Nacala, eyeing me from a safe distance behind his desk. Out the window, a breathtaking sun was setting over Nacala district and its population of hundreds of thousands of extremely poor people, served by just one doctor—me.

  Earlier that day I had arrived back in the city from a poor coastal area in the north named Memba. There I had spent two days using my hands to diagnose hundreds of patients with a terrible, unexplained disease that had completely paralyzed their legs within minutes of onset and, in severe cases, made them blind. And the mayor was right; I wasn’t 100 percent sure it was not contagious. I hadn’t slept the previous night but had stayed up, poring over my medical textbook, until I had finally concluded that the symptoms I was seeing had not been described before. I’d guessed this was some kind of poison rather than anything infectious, but I couldn’t be sure, and I had asked my wife to take our young children and leave the district.

  Before I could figure out what to say, the mayor said, “If you think it could be contagious, I must do something. To avoid a catastrophe, I must stop the disease from reaching the city.”

  The worst-case scenario had already unfolded in the mayor’s mind, and immediately spread to mine.

  The mayor was a man of action. He stood up and said, “Should I tell the military to set up a roadblock and stop the buses from the north?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I think it’s a good idea. You have to do something.”

  The mayor disappeared to make some calls.

  When the sun rose over Memba the next morning, some 20 women and their youngest children were already up, waiting for the morning bus to take them to the market in Nacala to sell their goods. When they learned the bus had been canceled, they walked down to the beach and asked the fishermen to take them by the sea route instead. The fishermen made room for everyone in their small boats, probably happy to be making the easiest money of their lives as they sailed south along the coast.

  Nobody could swim and when the boats capsized in the waves, all the mothers and children and fishermen drowned.

  That afternoon I headed north again, past the roadblock, to continue to investigate the strange disease. As I drove through Memba I came across a group of people lining up on the roadside dead bodies they had pulled put of the sea. I ran down to the beach but it was too late. I asked a man carrying the body of a young boy, “Why were all these children and mothers out in those fragile boats?”

  “There was no bus this morning,” he said. Several minutes later I could still barely understand what I had done. Still today I can’t forgive myself. Why did I have to say to the mayor, “You must do something”?

  I couldn’t blame these tragic deaths on the fishermen. Desperate people who need to get to market of course take the boat when the city authorities for some reason block their road.

  I have no way to tell you how I carried on with the work I had to do that day and in the days afterward. And I didn’t talk about this to anyone else for 35 years.

  But I did carry on with my work and eventually I discovered the cause of the paralytic disease: as I suspected, the people had been poisoned. The surprise was that they had not eaten anything new. The cassava that formed the basis for the local diet had to be processed for three days to make it edible. Everyone had always known that, so no one had ever even heard of anyone who had been poisoned or seen these symptoms. But this year, there had been a terrible harvest across the whole country and the government had been buying processed cassava at the highest price ever. The poor farmers were suddenly able to make that extra money they needed to escape poverty and were selling everything they had. After a successful day of selling, though, they were coming home hungry. So hungry that they couldn’t resist eating the unprocessed cassava roots straight from the fields. At 8 p.m. on August 21, 1981, this discovery transformed me from being a district doctor to being a researcher, and I spent the next ten years of my life investigating the interplay among economies, societies, toxins, and food.

  Fourteen years later, in 1995, the ministers in Kinshasa, the capital of DR C
ongo, heard that there was an Ebola outbreak in the city of Kitwik. They got scared. They felt they had to do something. They set up a roadblock.

  Again, there were unintended consequences. Feeding the people in the capital became a major problem because the rural area that had always supplied most of their processed cassava was on the other side of the disease-stricken area. The city was hungry and started buying all it could from its second-largest food-producing area. Prices skyrocketed, and guess what? A mysterious outbreak of paralyzed legs and blindness followed.

  Nineteen years after that, in 2014, there was an outbreak of Ebola in the rural north of Liberia. Inexperienced people from rich countries got scared and they all came up with the same idea: a roadblock!

  At the Ministry of Health, I encountered politicians of a higher quality. They were more experienced, and their experience made them cautious. Their main concern was that roadblocks would destroy the trust of the people abandoned behind them. This would have been absolutely catastrophic: Ebola outbreaks are defeated by contact tracers, who depend on people honestly disclosing everybody they have touched. These heroes were sitting in poor slum dwellings carefully interviewing people who had just lost a family member about every individual their loved one might have infected before dying. Often, of course, the person being interviewed was on that list and potentially infected. Despite the constant fear and wave after wave of rumors, there was no room for drastic, panicky action. The infection path could not be traced with brute force, just patient, calm, meticulous work. One single individual delicately leaving out information about his dead brother’s multiple lovers could cost a thousand lives.