Factfulness Buchzusammenfassung - das Wichtigste aus Factfulness

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Zusammenfassung von Factfulness

Name: Factfulness
Rating: 4.3 (476 reviews)
Author: Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund

Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund

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

4.3 (476 Bewertungen)

18 Min.

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What’s in it for me? Change your worldview and recognize the amazing progress being made.

In a perfect world, journalists would always present the news in a completely accurate way, and they’d give plenty of relevant context to make it even more impactful. But, unfortunately, we live in the real world, where journalists are in the business of attracting readers, and readers love things to be both super simple and full of drama. As a result, our worldview has become skewed — a poor representation of what the world is really like.

At the heart of our messed up worldview is the belief that people around the planet are worse off than they were before. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, there’s far less poverty than ever before, people everywhere are living longer and less of the world is being run by sexist and oppressive patriarchies.

All this positive change is the result of a global economy that continues to lift people out of poverty and increase their income levels. Indeed, if we combine middle- and high-income countries, we account for 91 percent of humanity. That’s pretty amazing, considering that, just 200 years ago, 85 percent of the world was mired in poverty.

These blinks help us understand just how much progress has been made, and how we all can learn to overcome the negatives to see our world in a positive, accurate light.

In these blinks, you’ll discover

why we shouldn’t think of things in the black-and-white terms of East and West anymore;
why blaming pharmaceutical CEOs is probably shortsighted; and
why natural disasters are less deadly than they used to be.

“Megamisconceptions,” like the East-vs-West divide, prevent us from seeing the world accurately.

Here’s a question for you: Over the past 20 years, what has happened to the level of extreme poverty in the world? Has it nearly doubled? Stayed the same? Or been nearly cut in half? If you guessed that it has been nearly halved, you’re one of the few people to answer the question correctly.

In the United States, only five percent of people got it right; in the United Kingdom, only nine percent picked the right answer – and those who got it wrong include some of the brightest experts working today. The reason why so few people have an accurate understanding of the world is due in large part to our natural instincts and what the author calls megamisconceptions.

Some misconceptions are mega because of how deeply they mess up our understanding of the world. One of the big ones is Westerners’ “us-versus-them” mentality – that is, the idea that West and the East are fundamentally different and somehow at odds with each other. This is also referred to as the outdated concept of the “developed world” versus the “developing world.”

When the author gave lectures, he noticed that many students still thought that the East was filled with countries where birth rates are out of control and where religion and culture prevent the creation of a modern or “Western” society. As one of Rosling’s students put it, “They can never live like us.”

But who exactly is “they,” or the “East,” or the “developing world” – is both Japan and Mexico City still part of the East? Are China and India still considered incapable of being home to modern cities?

Back in 1965, if we just looked at the child mortality rate around the world, which is a great test of a nation’s overall health, education and economic systems, 125 countries would fall into the “developing” category of having over five percent of their children die before their fifth birthday. Today, that category only contains 13 countries.

In other words, there is no “West and the rest” anymore.

Other megamisconceptions come as a result of our negativity instinct.

Here’s another question: In all of the world’s low-income nations, how many girls finish public school? Twenty percent, 40 percent or 60 percent? Are you already starting to guess that the answer will likely be the more positive one?

Indeed, 60 percent of the girls in low-income nations finish public school. What’s more, on average, all 30-year-old women have spent nine years in school. That’s only one year less than the worldwide average for 30-year-old men.

Our fear and size instincts, as well as our straight-line instinct, also contribute to our skewed understanding of the world.

If you see a chart with a line that’s going steadily up, your brain will likely tell you that this straight line will continue going up for the foreseeable future. However, very few charts have straight lines. Think of your own childhood growth rate; for a while, your height could probably be measured in a straight line, but then you hit a peak height, and it leveled off.

We think the same about population: our third megamisconception is that the world’s population will continue going up, up, up, when the fact is that we’re close to hitting our peak.

People tend to over-generalize and mistakenly think certain outcomes are unavoidable.

One of the best ways to combat many of our worst instincts is to collect the right data and give it the appropriate context. If you read that 4 million babies died last year, the size of that number could lead you to believe that we live in terrible times. However, if you look up how many babies died in 1950, and see that the number is 14.4 million, you get a much more accurate understanding of the times we live in.

Yes, in an ideal world, no babies would die – but, in ours, it’s important to contextualize misfortune in order to perceive progress. To have reduced the number of yearly infant deaths by ten million in less than 70 years is a great accomplishment, and we need to recognize such progress.

To see the world accurately, people need to take in multiple perspectives and avoid casting blame on individuals or groups.

One of the best ways to avoid overgeneralization is to travel and see other cultures firsthand. This is also a great way to gain multiple perspectives, which is hugely important, since taking in limited perspectives is another big roadblock to an accurate worldview.

If you were to go to Afghanistan today, which is one of the few countries still working to escape extreme poverty and the bottom income level, you’d meet young people who are nonetheless preparing for a modern life.

Avoid making rash decisions and exaggerations, and stick to the facts in education, business and journalism.

The final troublesome instinct we have is the urgency instinct, which leads us to make rash decisions that often end up being misguided or just plain bad.

Our most important problems, such as pharmaceutical companies not researching certain diseases or refugees fleeing in shoddy boats, are usually complex and require careful consideration of all possible repercussions. And this means that a problem hardly ever has a clear-cut solution.

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Worum geht es in Factfulness?

Factfulness (2018) offers readers a wealth of statistics and cold, hard facts that reveal the world to be a far better place than it was just a couple generations ago. But, more than that, author Hans Rosling also offers readers a way to revise their thinking and fight against our instinct to focus on the bad and lose sight of the good.

Wer Factfulness lesen sollte

Readers concerned about the planet
Activists and environmentalists
People involved in public health

Über den Autor

Hans Rosling was an esteemed public educator who strove to enlighten the minds of people around the globe. He used his decades of experience as a medical doctor and professor of public health to provide useful information about and solutions to the challenges of the day, especially in low-income communities. Before he passed away in 2017, Rosling gave extremely popular TED Talks and was ranked among the most influential people in the world by Time magazine.

Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund are the son and daughter-in-law of Hans Rosling. They are also the co-founders of the Gapminder Foundation, dedicated to designing graphics and using cutting-edge technology to make statistics and data more easily accessible and understood.

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