Book Review: Hans Rosling - Factfulness

When Bill Gates read this book, he liked it so much that he not only gushed copiously about it on his blog, he also offered to cover the cost of the ebook for every college graduate in the United States. Dang! In fairness to him, Factfulness is basically a Gates-seeking missile - it's a slim, efficient volume focused on exactly the issues of global poverty and economic development that he's spent the last few decades thinking about, and it's not only packed with interesting data but also accompanied with a neatly itemized mental checklist for identifying and countering some major cognitive biases that affect the interpretation of that data. Its author, who created the excellent data visualization site Gapminder, sadly passed away before the book's release, but his children/cofounders cleaned up his manuscript and published it in the belief that its framework was too important to abandon. I agree - while individually each of these cognitive biases are familiar, rarely do you see them so neatly categorized, or so clearly applied to such important issues. Best of all, its positive conclusions are hopeful without being too airy, and its message of data-supported optimism is needed immensely in a world that seems tailor-made to dishearten us.

Even people who "don't pay attention to the news" pay attention to the news, they just tend do it badly, and they are not alone: all of us have an incomplete view of the world, almost by definition. It's true enough that there's enough news about war, poverty, deprivation, disease, and unhappiness in the world to depress just about anyone, yet being depressed about the world is exactly what this book is warning against. All of us have cognitive biases that affect how we process information, particularly about faraway strangers living lives that don't have much to do with us directly, and that's not helped by the media's well-known "if it bleeds, it leads" tendency, which we unfortunately encourage. Life truly is not as bad around the world as it seems, but in order to appreciate the dramatic progress the world has made in recent years, you not only have to filter out a big percentage of the shouting, you also have to unlearn some cognitive biases. Context is key, but that's exactly what we don't often get from the news, and so we have to supply it on our own.

Rosling uses many examples from his home country of Sweden to that effect, showing that many of our beliefs about foreign countries should look different with a bit of context. For example, no one should feel good when reading about a high rate of child mortality in developing nations, but learning that that statistic is actually lower than the equivalent number for most Western nations in the early part of the 20th century not only lowers your blood pressure, it makes you appreciate the tremendous work of governments, companies, NGOs, and the people themselves. It also helps you think more clearly about what's still to be done, since without context, foreign problems can seem utterly intractable. We often forget that while civilization doesn't always progress evenly in each part of the world, it usually does progress, and though it's very easy to simply toss news items into the Good or Bad bucket, especially in a rich Western country consumed with its own issues, life is getting better for more people at a faster rate than at any point in human history.

If you're like me, whenever you read a statement like "life is getting better!" you almost automatically leap to provide counterexamples of world tragedies, but, cleverly, this book provides its own tools to prove its thesis! Normally books that try to prove themselves are to be taken extremely skeptically ("of course the Bible/Koran/Torah is true, it says so itself!"), but I really don't think it's possible to argue against any of its 10 Rules of Thumb, especially when applied to the data herein, because even if you might decide that one or another of them isn't applicable, they are inarguably useful. Rosling presents a list of 10 instincts that we all have, and recommends some strategies for whenever we notice them in ourselves reacting to the daily parade of horribles:

1. The gap instinct - 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.
2. The negativity instinct - Factfulness is recognizing when we get negative news, and remembering that information about bad events is much more likely to reach us. When things are getting better we often don't hear about them. This gives us a systematically too-negative impression of the world around us, which is very stressful.
3. The straight line instinct - Factfulness is recognizing the assumption that a line will just continue straight, and remembering that such lines are rare in reality.
4. The fear instinct - Factfulness is recognizing when frightening things get our attention, and remembering that these are not necessarily the most risky. Our natural fears of violence, captivity, and contamination make us systematically overestimate these risks.
5. The size instinct - Factfulness is recognizing when a lonely number seems impressive (small or large), and remembering that you could get the opposite impression if it were compared with or divided by some other relevant number.
6. The generalization instinct - Factfulness is recognizing when a category is being used in an explanation, and remembering that categories can be misleading. We can't stop generalization and we shouldn't even try. What we should try to do is to avoid generalizing incorrectly.
7. The destiny instinct - Factfulness is recognizing that many things (including people, countries, religions, and cultures) appear to be constant just because the change is happening slowly, and remembering that even small, slow changes gradually add up to big changes.
8. The single perspective instinct - Factfulness is recognizing that a single perspective can limit your imagination, and remembering that it is better to look at problems from many angles to get a more accurate understanding and find practical solutions.
9. The blame instinct - Factfulness is recognizing when a scapegoat is being used and remembering that blaming an individual often steals the focus from other possible explanations and blocks our ability to prevent similar problems in the future.
10. The urgency instinct - Factfulness is recognizing when a decision feels urgent and remembering that it rarely is.

Note that unlike many "Rules for X" lists out there, these are not ideological prescriptions masquerading as objectivity. It seems like it's usually conservatives urging delay or inaction on any given issue (which in fact is one of the primary definitions of "conservative"), but none of these heuristics support, for example, reducing or ceasing efforts to lower child mortality; in fact all of these strategies could just as well be used on the claim that child mortality is nothing to worry about. This means that it's also totally fair to use these tools to argue we should be more concerned about something than we already are. So yes: any tools that help us reckon the magnitude of our problems, fairly weigh evidence, and accurately determine solutions are welcome in our struggles with wars, diseases, famines, poverty, and climate change. This book did not invent any of its strategies, but I have never personally seen them gathered together in once place like this, so in spite of its slim size it makes an extremely convenient handbook. Perhaps Gates was not wrong to consider it as necessary for college students as any official textbook.