Factfulness

Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World -- and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, by Hans Rosling

This book has been making something of a splash in non-fiction and especially tech circles.  Bill Gates endorsed it, so that's probably making an impression in a lot of places.  It's the sort of book I really like, but I wasn't in a big hurry, so I put my name on the hold list at the public library and then didn't actually read the book until 4 days before it was due back.  I thought maybe I'd skim and get it later, but instead I was instantly grabbed, and read the whole thing in less than 24 hours.  (Although it's a thickish book, it's quite fast to read.)  Now I'm pushing it to the top of my blogging pile, since I have to return it right away!

Hans Rosling was a doctor, expert in international health, speaker, and adviser to WHO and UNICEF.  His TED talks are popular, he helped co-found Doctors Without Borders in his native Sweden, and all sorts of other things.  He ran the Gapminder website, which includes some wonderful tools, including the absorbing Dollar Street project.

Rosling likes data, and and believes that if you haven't got a clear, fact-based picture of the world, you won't be able to solve the problems around you.  Over his long medical career working in Africa and speaking with Westerners, he saw that we in the West tend to have outdated, colonialist-based ideas about everybody else.  We tend to assume that there are rich countries and poor countries, and that everybody in the poor countries is pretty miserable.  He got into the habit of giving a little quiz about world conditions to his audiences -- you can take a version of it here -- and took delight in showing people how wrong their ideas were about poor countries.

In fact, things have been getting much better for most of the world population, and Rosling proves it with graph after graph.  Life expectancy, education, access to medical care and clean water, birth rate, all sorts of indications show that in the last 20 years, the proportion of the world's population living in extreme poverty has halved.  That's not to say everything is great, but things are improving and doing so quickly.  This is wonderful news!  Humanity can conquer extreme poverty, which was the normal condition of practically everybody until fairly recently.

Rosling points out that we like to think in terms of opposites, with a gap in between.  In reality, the majority of people live in the middle of any graph.  Most people now live in a middle-income state; what an American or Swede would consider poor, but still a lot better than extreme poverty, really pretty similar to where Swedes lived within 50-75 years ago -- and improving fast.  (Rosling remembered open drainage ditches carrying sewage when he was a child; he nearly died in one.  His family was thrilled to get a washing machine.)

My favorite quotation:

Have you heard people say that humans used to live in balance with nature? 

Well, yes, there was a balance....Until 1800 women gave birth to six children on average....On average four out of six children died before becoming parents themselves, leaving just two surviving children to parent the next generation.  There was a balance.  It wasn't because humans lived in balance with nature.  Humans died in balance with nature.  It was utterly brutal and tragic.

Rosling, being a Swede who has mostly worked in Africa and Europe, spends pretty well no time on the Americas, barring some anecdotes and data about Central and South American countries.  He takes a moment to point out that the US spends double the money on health care with a worse result than other wealthy countries, but also comments that Americans tend to do slightly better than Europeans on his quiz.  So don't go in thinking that this book is going to say anything much about the US; it's got a very different focus.

The whole thing is an absorbing and compelling read.  It's persuasive and inspiring, because he is showing that things are, on the whole, getting better and not worse.  The world can improve, people can live materially better lives, and it's all happening without our noticing very much -- but pretty soon, Europe and the US will be on the periphery, while Asia and Africa (and, one presumes, Central/South America) do all the growing.   This should all inspire us to continue trying and tackle the very serious problems we still have.

I'd call this a must-read book for anyone wishing to be informed about the state of the globe (hopefully everybody?).  It reminds me of other books I've read, such as The Bright Continent, The Rational Optimist, and Steven Pinker's last couple of books, which I have not read yet.

As a final shot, take a look at this great article from Our World in Data: A History of Global Living Conditions in 5 Charts.   Here's a sample chart!