You see this everywhere on Levels 2 and 3 across the world. In Sweden, if someone built their house like that, we would think they had a severe planning problem, or maybe the builders had run away. But you can’t generalize from Sweden to Tunisia. The Salhis, and many others living in similar circumstances, have found a brilliant way to solve several problems at once. On Levels 2 and 3, families often do not have access to a bank to put their savings and cannot get a loan. So, to save up to improve their home, they must pile up money. Money, though, can be stolen or lose its value through inflation. So, instead, whenever they can afford them, the Salhis buy actual bricks, which won’t lose their value. But there is no space inside to store the bricks and the bricks might get stolen if they are left in a pile outside. Better to add the bricks to the house as you buy them. Thieves can’t steal them. Inflation won’t change their value. No one needs to check your credit rating. And over 10 or 15 years you are slowly building your family a better home. Instead of assuming that the Salhis are lazy or disorganized, assume they are smart and ask yourself, How can this be such a smart solution?
For years after the global crash of 2008, the International Monetary Fund continued to forecast 3 percent annual economic growth for countries on Level 4. Each year, for five years, countries on Level 4 failed to meet this forecast. Each year, for five years, the IMF said, “Next year it will get back on track.” Finally, the IMF realized that there was no “normal” to go back to, and it downgraded its future growth expectations to 2 percent. At the same time the IMF acknowledged that the fast growth (above 5 percent) during those years had instead happened in countries on Level 2, like Ghana, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Kenya in Africa, and Bangladesh in Asia.
Child mortality was highest in tribal societies in the rain forest, and among traditional farmers in the remote rural areas across the world.
Chemophobia also means that every six months there is a “new scientific finding” about a synthetic chemical found in regular food in very low quantities that, if you ate a cargo ship or two of it every day for three years, could kill you. At this point, highly educated people put on their worried faces and discuss it over a glass of red wine. The zero-death toll seems to be of no interest in these discussions. The level of fear seems entirely driven by the “chemical” nature of the invisible substance.
Alongside all the other improvements, our surveillance of suffering has improved tremendously. This improved reporting is itself a sign of human progress, but it creates the impression of the exact opposite.
Just 50 years ago, China, India, and South Korea were all way behind where sub-Saharan Africa is today in most ways, and Asia’s destiny was supposed then to be exactly what Africa’s destiny is supposed to be now: “They will never be able to feed 4 billion people.”
Motor vehicle accidents show a similar hump-shaped pattern. Countries on Level 1 have fewer motor vehicles per person, so they do not have many motor vehicle accidents. In countries on Levels 2 and 3, the poorest people keep walking the roads while others start to travel by motor vehicles—minibuses and motorcycles—but roads, traffic regulations, and traffic education are still poor, so accidents reach a peak, before they decline again in countries on Level 4. The same goes for child drownings as a percentage of all deaths.
Historically, humans lived in surroundings that didn’t change much. Learning how things worked and then assuming they would continue to work that way rather than constantly reevaluating was probably an excellent survival strategy.
Only 9 percent of the world lives in low-income countries. And remember, we just worked out that those countries are not nearly as terrible as people think.
Natural disasters (0.1 percent of all deaths), plane crashes (0.001 percent), murders (0.7 percent), nuclear leaks (0 percent), and terrorism (0.05 percent). None of them kills more than 1 percent of the people who die each year, and still they get enormous media attention.
Talking about the 1600 people who died after tsunami damaged the Fukushima nuclear plant These 1,600 people died because they escaped. They were mainly old people who died because of the mental and physical stresses of the evacuation itself or of life in evacuation shelters. It wasn’t radioactivity, but the fear of radioactivity,
In 2016 a total of 40 million commercial passenger flights landed safely at their destinations. Only ten ended in fatal accidents. Of course, those were the ones the journalists wrote about: 0.000025 percent of the total. Safe flights are not newsworthy.
[...] Over the last 70 years. Flying has gotten 2,100 times safer.
In the deepest poverty you should never do anything perfectly. If you do you are stealing resources from where they can be better used.
In the year 1800, roughly 85 percent of humanity lived on Level 1, in extreme poverty. All over the world, people simply did not have enough food. Most people went to bed hungry several times a year. Across Britain and its colonies, children had to work to eat, and the average child in the United Kingdom started work at age ten. One-fifth the entire Swedish population, including many of my relatives, fled starvation to the United States, and only 20 percent of them ever returned. When the harvest failed and your relatives, friends, and neighbors starved to death, what did you do? You escaped. You migrated. If you could.
[...] In 1997, 42 percent of the population of both India and China were living in extreme poverty. By 2017, in India, that share had dropped to 12 percent: there were 270 million fewer people living in extreme poverty than there had been just 20 years earlier. In China, that share dropped to a stunning 0.7 percent over the same period, meaning another half a billion people over this crucial threshold.
[..] Just 20 years ago, 29 percent of the world population lived in extreme poverty. Now that number is 9 percent. Today almost everybody has escaped hell.
Societies and cultures are not like rocks, unchanging and unchangeable. They move. Western societies and cultures move, and non-Western societies and cultures move—often much faster.
You won’t find any countries where child mortality has increased. Because the world in general is getting better.
We avoid reminding ourselves and our children about the miseries and brutalities of the past. The truth is to be found in ancient graveyards and burial sites, where archeologists have to get used to discovering that a large proportion of all the remains they dig up are those of children. Most will have been killed by starvation or disgusting diseases, but many child skeletons bear the marks of physical violence. Hunter-gatherer societies often had murder rates above 10 percent and children were not spared. In today’s graveyards, child graves are rare.
The image of a dangerous world has never been broadcast more effectively than it is now, while the world has never been less violent and more safe.
The world used to be divided into two but isn’t any longer. Today, most people are in the middle. There is no gap between the West and the rest, between developed and developing, between rich and poor. And we should all stop using the simple pairs of categories that suggest there is.
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. The reality is often not polarized at all. Usually the majority is right there in the middle, where the gap is supposed to be. To control the gap instinct, look for the majority.
When the journalist says with a sad face, “in times like these,” will you smile and think that she is referring to the first time in history when disaster victims get immediate global attention and foreigners send their best helicopters? Will you feel fact-based hope that humanity will be able to prevent even more horrific deaths in the future?
The goal of higher income is not just bigger piles of money. The goal of longer lives is not just extra time. The ultimate goal is to have the freedom to do what we want.
Melinda Gates runs a philanthropic foundation together with her husband, Bill. They have spent billions of dollars to save the lives of millions of children in extreme poverty by investing in primary health care and education. Yet intelligent and well-meaning people keep contacting their foundation saying that they should stop. The argument goes like this: “If you keep saving poor children, you’ll kill the planet by causing overpopulation.”
Warning: Objects in Your Memories Were Worse Than They Appear
With averages we must always remember that there’s a spread.
The gap instinct divides the world into “us” and “them,” and the generalization instinct makes “us” think of “them” as all the same.
When one of my students asks why the walls of the hostpital in India are not painted She explains that not painting the walls can be a strategic decision in countries on Levels 2 and 3. It’s not that they can’t afford the paint. Flaking walls keep away the richer patients and their time-consuming demands for costly treatments, allowing hospitals to use their limited resources to treat more people in more cost-effective ways.
The indian doctor says So your country has become so safe that when you go abroad the world is dangerous for you.
When a European Union representative in a World Economic Forum in Davos 2007 blamed through a self-evident fact that China emits more CO2 than the USA, and india more than Germany, the Chinese expert becomes angry but keeps silent The Indian expert, in contrast, could not sit still. He waved his arm and could barely wait for the moderator’s signal that he could speak. He stood up. There was a short silence while he looked into the face of each panel member. His elegant dark blue turban and expensive-looking dark gray suit, and the way he was behaving in his moment of outrage, confirmed his status as one of India’s highest-ranking civil servants with many years’ experience as a lead expert at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. He made a sweeping gesture toward the panel members from the rich nations and then said loudly and accusingly, “It was you, the richest nations, that put us all in this delicate situation. You have been burning increasing amounts of coal and oil for more than a century. You and only you pushed us to the brink of climate change.” Then he suddenly changed posture, put his palms together in an Indian greeting, bowed, and almost whispered in a very kind voice, “But we forgive you, because you did not know what you were doing. We should never blame someone retrospectively for harm they were unaware of.” Then he straightened up and delivered his final remark as a judge giving his verdict, emphasizing each word by slowly moving his raised index finger. “But from now on we count carbon dioxide emission per person.”