Book review -- it's not 1965 any more

Factfulness by Hans Rosling (2018)

This book (buy it here), by a Swedish doctor and medical researcher who has worked in some of the world's poorest countries, has points in common with Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now and The Better Angels of Our Nature.  It's an evidence-based look at the real condition of our world and the way things are going, and at how most people's perception of those things is so badly mistaken.  Rosling's book, however, is shorter and more accessible than Pinker's, and focuses more specifically on health and economic development.

He starts off with a self-test -- a list of basic factual questions on global education levels, life expectancy, population growth, vaccination rates, etc, and invites you to check your own answers against the correct ones.  He then points out that when he's given this test, even most educated people get the answers not only wrong but drastically wrong.  Almost everyone believes that in all these areas, the global situation is not only worse but far, far worse than it actually is.

Part of the problem is that people's perception of the world is still stuck in a half-century-old framework which no longer describes reality.  In that framework, the world was divided into rich and poor countries, "developed" and "developing", with the latter category having the large majority of the world's population.  But this is no longer a realistic view of what the world is like.  As an example, he gives a chart plotting countries on a graph that shows number of children per family and the proportion of children that die before growing up.  It looks like what we expect -- a large number of countries clustered in the "large families, many deaths" category, a smaller number in the "small families, few deaths" category, and very few countries in between.  But this chart is from 1965.  A chart of today, using exactly the same criteria, shows most countries -- with 85% of the world's population -- now in the "small families, few deaths" group.  By this criterion, 85% of the world is now "developed" by 1965 standards.

He looks at per-capita income in the same way.  Half a century ago, the world was pretty clearly divided into rich countries and poor countries, and most people in the West think it still is that way.  In fact, most of the countries that were poor back then have moved into the middle-income category, with some encroaching on the lower reaches of the "rich" category.  The chart no longer looks like two separate clumps of countries, rich and poor -- it's more cigar-shaped, with most countries in the middle and relatively few at the poor extreme.  There's no sharp discontinuity between rich and middle-income, no obvious place to draw a dividing line between a favored minority of developed countries and the rest.

Measures of global health -- life expectancy, vaccinations, infant mortality, and so on -- show the same pattern.  Most of the former "Third World" is in the process of catching up with the developed world (there remains a "straggler" group of seriously poor countries, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, but even these are better off than they used to be).  We haven't yet reached the point where most of the Earth's population is as prosperous and healthy as the US, western Europe, and Japan, but things are clearly heading in that direction, and it will take just a few more decades -- certainly not a century -- to get there.

If you're my age, you can remember decades ago seeing appeals to donate to help victims of massive famines in places like Ethiopia and Bangladesh, complete with pictures of pitiful stick-limbed children with swollen bellies.  Notice you don't see those any more?  It's because those places aren't like that any more.  In Bangladesh, for example, in 1972 the average woman had seven children and the child survival rate was under 80%.  Today it's two children per woman and 97%.  Life expectancy there has gone from 52 to 73 years over the same period.  Still not as good as France or Japan, but the magnitude of the change is undeniable.

Pages 60-63 have a series of striking charts showing the global changes from a few decades ago to the present in dozens of factors like literacy, malnutrition, oil spills, female education, air pollution, clean water, laws protecting nature, the percentage of the world's population living under democratic governments, and so on.  In every single case there has been substantial improvement -- in some cases, so huge as to be revolutionary, in just a few decades.

So why does the perception persist that everything is terrible and getting worse?  Rosling discusses ten "instincts", as he calls them, that lead people to misperceive and misinterpret reality (useful information in a broad range of situations), and offers suggestions for how to correct for them.  The media tend to over-dramatize and over-simplify how they report things and to treat exceptional cases -- deep poverty or large families in poor countries, for example -- as if they were still typical.  There's also the fact that people who are now in the age ranges that are socially dominant (40 to 70, say) got their education decades ago when the world was very different, and their picture of reality has not evolved to keep up with how things have changed.

Like Pinker, Rosling knows that many readers will be viscerally resistant to believing much of this, so he provides a great deal of supporting data, though it's not as overwhelming as the mountains of evidence that make Pinker's tomes so massive.

The fact that so many people, even those in positions of power, have such a drastically-mistaken view of the world can all too easily lead to despair, paralysis, and bad decision-making.  We need to understand reality, and the future we're heading for, the way it actually is.