I’ve blogged about the stories we humans tell ourselves and the power of those stories in terms of fiction. Brain neurochemistry also affects the way we perceive the world around us. The late Hans Rosling’s remarkable book, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—And Why Things Are Better Than You Think, cracks open our cognitive biases in a unique and accessible way. 

What is Factfulness?

According the Gapminder website (health information foundation started by Rosling) factfulness is “the stress-reducing habit of only carrying opinions for which you have strong supporting facts.” Rosling was a Swedish global public-health physician. He provided hands-on care for patients around the world while collecting data to evaluate the health status of their cultures as a whole. A popular TED talk presenter, in the last years of his life Rosling wrote Factfulness, which his son and daughter-in-law saw to publication. 

Step-by-step, year-by-year, the world is improving. Not on every single measure every single year, but as a rule. Though the world faces huge challenges, we have made tremendous progress. This the fact-based worldview. 

Hans Rosling

Looking at the World with Factfulness

Tech-billionaire Bill Gates, who has devoted much time and resources to global ills (literally), recommends Factfulnessas a must-read for every graduating college student.  I’ve been out of school for awhile, but found this book an excellent challenge to so many of my preconceived “facts” and logical fallacies. 

 Empathy and Compassion

Factfulness does not minimize the devastation of war, disease, natural disaster, and famine on individuals or societies. Its author spent his professional career in the trenches, fighting the health-related consequences of extreme poverty. Recognizing that humanity has made progress in the overall improvement of quality of life is not a reason to make less effort, spend less money, or devote less time to humanitarian relief. Factfulness, in fact, should invigorate the world to more ambitious efforts. Success is empowering!

“Developed” Versus “Developing” Nations

From reading Factfulness I realized how very little I knew of the world outside my own tiny corner of the USA. My general impress of “the third world,” gained from a hodge-podge of new reports, action films, and seventh-grade geography lessons is not only vague but inaccurate. 

As Rosling explained, gradations of personal resources exist within every country. An overall “developed” nation like the United States still has many individuals living in poverty. A “developing” nation like Somalia has many poverty-stricken citizens, yet working-class, middle-income, and wealthy people belong to this society as well.  

A more useful tool to determine how a country is progressing overall is to measure the daily life of its citizens in terms of clean water, foods available, cooking methods, sleeping, and transportation. In Factfulness, Rosling defines levels from one to four within each of these daily life categories. A Level One person must walk everywhere, while a Level Four person has a car. This scheme is comparable across all countries. The proportion of Level One to Level Four within a country is an indicator of how well the nation is meeting the basic needs of its citizens. A change in proportion of people in each level through time indicates overall progress or regression of the society.

Our instinct is to notice the bad more than the good . . . the misremembering of the past, selective reporting by journalists and activists; and the feeling that as long as things are bad it’s heartless to say they are getting better.

Hans Rosling

Reasons We’re Wrong—Our Biases

         Factfulness is a warm, chatty, accessible introduction to statistics and logical thinking. Each  chapter describes a common misconception and how to retrain our brains to overcome it. 

• The gap instinct: the world is divided into two 
• The negativity instinct: the world is getting worse
• The straight-line instinct: the world population is just increasing and increasing
• The fear instinct: frightening things are hard-wired to get our attention
• The size instinct: a lone number is often impressive and easy to misjudge
• The generalization instinct: a category is used as an explanation
• The destiny instinct: innate characteristics determine outcomes for people, countries, religions, or cultures 
• The single-perspective instinct: the preference for single causes and single solutions
• The blame instinct: the urge to find a clear, simple reason for why something bad has happened
• The urgency instinct: the desire to take immediate action in the face of a perceived imminent danger

Living Factfulness

Factfulness is the sort of book you want to drink in—gulp down the clear, analytical thinking and make it your own. But that requires a great deal of brain re-training. Each chapter gives some hints and suggestions for what would amount to a program of study to master the material. The Gapminder website is an excellent clearinghouse of data to form your own conclusions about humanity’s efforts to find solutions to global problems.

As a fiction person, I’m also inspired to read globally and learn what writers from all the over the world have shared about their daily lives and culture. (The city photograph, above, is Nairobi, Kenya.)

And Now a Word From Our Sponsor

Like the blog? Subscribe (form at the bottom of my website) to never miss an issue. Want more? Subscribe to the quinterly newsletter for exclusive content. And, of course, I’m selling books. In the spirit of the letter-writing season, St. Louis Writers Guild recently published Love Letters to St. Louis. This adorable letter-shaped volume of short stories, poems, essays, and illustrations included my first science fiction story, “Welcome to Earthport Prime: A Self-Guided Tour.” A perfect Valentine’s Gift, and profits benefit the guild’s young writers’ program. 

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