One of the most enlightening books I have ever read. This is the perfect, fact-based book that goes against mediatized pessimism and fatalism.

Rosling deconstructs many of our irrational behaviors. These are what he calls "instincts", which wrongly leads us to biased and inaccurate judgements about the world.

It's important to remember the real statistics about the current state of the world. Some things are bad but getting better. Everyone should read it.

My Notes

Gap Instinct: It's Not Rich vs Poor

We have a mode of thinking that is binary. But we can no longer talk about "rich" vs "poor" or "us" vs "the rest". For the last 50 years, the world has experienced tremendous economic improvement. Today, poor countries have a level of wealth equivalent to that of Western countries in the past

We should see countries through the 4 income brackets:

• level 1 - people living on $2/day or less, it's 1 billion people
• level 2 - people living on $2 to $8/day, it's 3 billion people
• level 3 - people living on $8 to $32/day, it's 2 billion people
• level 4 - people living on $32/day or more, it's 1 billion people

We are naturally drawn to extreme. If we think about inequality, we might think about Brazil and the story we hear about the huge gap between the poor and the rich.

In 2015, the richest 10% earned 41% of the total income. That seems to be a lot — and it is. But it's the lowest since 1990, where the ten richest percent earned 50% of the total income.

Today, most Brazilians, live on Level 3, with $8 to $32 a day, enough to get a motorbike, reading glasses and so on.. In reality, there is no gap.

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.

Negativity Instinct: Only the Bad Makes Noise

"The world is getting worse" is a mega misconception.

2008 crisis, sea level rising, climate change, geopolitical tensions.. all these events make us think that the world is getting worse day after day.

In the last 20 years, the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has almost halved.

• In 1800: 85% of humanity lived in Level 1 (< $2/day)
• 1966: 50% lived in extreme poverty
• 2017: only 9% of the world lives in extreme poverty.

Low-income countries are much more developed than most people think. And vastly fewer people live in them. The idea of a divided world with a majority stuck in misery and deprivation is an illusion. A complete misconception. Simply wrong.

China and India offer a great example.

• In 1997, 42% of the population of both India and China were living in extreme poverty.
• By 2017, the share of the population of India living in extreme poverty dropped to 12% in India, and to 0.7% in China. These evolutions are stunning.

Life expectancy also improved a lot, going from 31 years in 1800 to 72 years in 2017.

Straight Line Instinct: Not All Lines Are Straight

We tend to think that all lines are straight.

When it comes to population growth, our first thought is that the population is just increasing.

"Just" implies that if nothing is done, then the population is going to increase forever. It makes us think that a drastic action must be taken.

For example, almost everyone gets this question wrong (myself included): There are 2 billion children in the world today, aged 0 to 15 years old. How many children will there be in the year 2100, according to the UN?

Among these 3 lines, one is the exact forecast of the UN. Most people tend to choose A, maybe B, but certainly not C, which is the right answer. According to the UN, there will be 2 billion children in 2100.

This is because we tend think that lines should always grow in a straight way.

Fear Instinct: Our Hardwired Tendency to Pay More Attention to Frightening Things

The fear instinct is what makes us give our attention to the dramatic events in daily life and overestimating how bad our world is, while neglecting what has been achieved.

In fact, the number of deaths per year from natural disasters decreased to less than half during the last hundred years.

The world in which we live today is the most peaceful ever. Yet, most people overdramatize it. There surely are some problems still, but that doesn't mean that it's not improving. It's bad and it's improving. Both at the same time.

A typical example is airplane crash. In 2016, a total of 40 millions commercial flights landed safely at their destinations. Only 10 ended in fatal accidents. And it's those 10 that got the most media coverage (0.000025%).

It's the second best year in terms of safety in aviation history, but we don't get to notice it.

Size Instinct: What I See is Meaningless

In the poorest countries of the world, one should not try to save the most people by looking after each individual, but rather help strengthening the infrastructure and the foundation of the health care system. That’s what Rosling did while in Mozambique, the poorest country at that time.

Building impressive hospitals is useless if you let thousands of children dying in their homes. You should start by educating citizens, preventing those deaths first, before giving health care.

That’s why seeing only the number of people hospitalized is not very smart, because you miss those who can’t make it to the hospitals.

The size instinct is the tendency to get things out of proportion. You usually underestimate or overestimate wrongly something.

For example, an American traveling to Vietnam might think that the Vietnamese commemorative monuments of the War against the US would be huge, but in fact it is only a very small event in the history of the country. Vietnam was in war with France for 200 years, and with China for 2000 years, so the one against the US is very small relatively to the others.

Generalization Instinct: Categorizing into Groups

Generalization can be very helpful for everyday life, because it prevents us to think extensively about everything in a unique way. However, generalization is also a major factor misleading our judgements: "us" vs "them", "developed" vs "undeveloped" etc...

As Rosling recalled, one of his students was injured after placing her legs in an elevator door at a hospital in India, assuming it would keep the door open momentarily. This is typically a generalization. Just because it's like that in the US or anywhere else doesn't mean it applies to other places as well.

We tend to think that every country is either like us, Level 4, or disastrous, as the media depict it.

Single Perspective Instinct: There Isn't Just One Cause/Solution

Forming your worldview by relying on the media would be like forming your view about me by looking only at a picture of my foot.

We love simple ideas. They are very useful to make a whole story about everything. One cause to blame. One solution to support.

But the reality is harder than that. The preference for single causes or solutions to problems is what Rosling calls the Single Perspective Instinct.

We cannot claim that inequality is the cause of not reaching equality, nor that problems in the market comes from government interference with the free market.

There are 2 reasons why we do this mistake.

1. Professionals (Experts & Activists): We are all expert in some area, but not in others. Our problem is believing that expertise transfers from one area to the next, thus leading to misinterpretation based on our skills and knowledge.
2. Political Ideology: From 2012 to 2016, 9 out of 10 countries with the fastest growth scored low on democracy, except for the US. Claiming that democracy is the way to health improvement, peace and good things isn't accurate. It's just the single perspective mindset.

Blame Instinct: Resist Pointing Your Finger

Most of the time, it’s the journalists, the CEOs, and the politicians that are blamed for whatever bad happening. But the truth is that it’s completely different.

Even the countries with the worst imaginable leaders made progress, which means that progress doesn’t come from leaders. It comes from society as whole.

We have an instinct to find someone to blame, but we rarely look in the mirror.

Most of the human-emitted carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over the last 50 years came from countries who are now on level 4. Canada’s per capita CO2 is still twice as high as China’s and 8 times as high as India’s. Therefore, blaming China or India for climate change is just as stupid as blaming a journalist for its publication (they do their work, based on a bad knowledge of the world).

The problem is that when we identify the bad guy, we are done thinking. And it’s always more complicated than that.

Factfulness is to recognize when a scapegoat is being used and that blaming it often steals the focus of other explanations.

Urgency Instinct: Act Now or Lose the Chance Forever

Now or never! You have to decide! The Urgency Instinct makes us want to take immediate action in the face of a perceived imminent danger.

It was useful in the past to prevent our ancestors from being eaten by lions, but today it's almost never true. All it does is increase our stress, further deteriorating our critical thinking.

When we feel urgency, we tend to act quickly without thinking things through clearly. This urgency instinct is often used by climate activists and salespeople to influence our behavior.

While it is true that some problems need to be solved, the urgency only makes our decisions worst.

There are 5 global risks we should worry about:

• Global Pandemic - the Spanish flu killed 50 million people in the wake of WWI, reducing lifespan from 33 to 23 years. Pandemic doesn't need physical contact to spread, thus its danger.
• Financial Collapse - it's not because nobody predict it that it won't happen, and its consequences might be worse than that of 2008.
• WWIII - countries fighting for their own interest is very wrong, but not inevitable.
• Climate Change - looking at the worst case scenario is useless: we all know the threat. It's richest countries that need to start managing its carbon emissions.
• Extreme Poverty - not really a risk, but more a suffering (misery for people).

There might be another major threat that we didn't think about (technology? AI?).

Factfulness is recognizing when a decision feels urgent and remembering that it rarely is.