Book shows the world isn’t as bad as everyone might think

I just read a marvelous book that shifted my world view and helped me feel more optimistic about the future.

The book is titled, “Factfulness, Ten Reasons We’re Wrong about the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think.” The author, Hans Rosling was a Swedish doctor, researcher and statistician who died in February 2017. Rosling dedicated his life to searching for the truth about the human experience. Along with his son, Ola and daughter-in-law Anna, he wrote the book using research conducted over many years. The book was published in 2018.

The authors took what many consider to be conventional wisdom about world problems, researched the assumptions behind that wisdom, searched for reliable sources, (United Nations, Center for Disease Control, World Health Organization, World Bank, etc.), then revealed what the facts show. In so many cases global beliefs about the state of our world are wrong.

Rosling asks the reader, “How many of the world’s 1-year-old children have been vaccinated against some disease?”

The answer is 80 percent, way more than most people guess. Or, he asks, “How have the number of deaths from natural disasters changed over the last 100 years?”

Deaths decreased to less than half! That’s certainly not what I thought.

He spoke about the consequences of trying to solve world problems — or any problem — if you aren’t first properly assessing the issue. Mistakes can precipitate dire consequences.

While working in Africa trying to help a village that had a mysterious disease, he and the village chief agreed to have a roadblock set up. When people couldn’t get to the village by bus to sell their goods, they hired fishermen to take to them to the village via the sea. The boats capsized and 20 people drowned. It turned out the disease was from a form of poisoning from eating cassava melons that hadn’t been properly cured. Rosling tells this painful story to illustrate an example of the “urgency instinct,” the tendency to feel some action must be taken immediately.

That instinct is one of 10 he’s identified that cause humans to misinterpret the world.

The “gap instinct” is the belief that the world is economically divided into the haves and have-nots. Instead, he describes four categories, from extremely poor (Level 1) to wealthy (Level 4). Seventy percent of earth’s 7 billion people exist on mid-levels 2 and 3, and over time the degree of poverty is decreasing.

The “negativity instinct” is our tendency to notice the bad more than the good. We miss what he calls, “a secret, silent miracle of human progress” because it doesn’t get as much attention.

The “straight line” instinct is our tendency to think a line on a graph will automatically go up and up, in particular when you look at population growth. But his statistics show that as women become more educated, they have fewer children and thus the world population will plateau.

The “fear instinct” is our tendency to fear things that might not be what is most dangerous to us but are the most publicized.

Without me listing all of the instincts that lead us astray, the point is that we need to be aware of these deep-seated instincts and make use of his suggested ways to temper them.

He asks us to compare things to how they used to be, not just how they are now. He wants us to look at history and see that there is a “trend toward peace, prosperity and solutions to our global problems.”

His book encouraged me to work toward those goals with renewed focus and a sense of hope. To learn more, go to the website, www.gapminder.org.

This story was originally published February 25, 2019 at 11:03 AM.