If you are like me, you like to get up in the morning and, while you sip your coffee or tea, read or hear something good about the human experience and condition. A new recognition for the town schools, a new medical discovery, a fair election held somewhere in the planet. Some mornings are full of good news. But even if you find no news to lift your spirits, don’t feel that things are bad or, even worse, they are heading south. While you have tried to stay abreast of the world’s everyday developments, you have most likely missed the much bigger stories about the humanity’s advance for better, fairer, and healthier living. But don’t feel bad about yourself. Equally ignorant and unaware are some of the most learned and best-positioned-to-know people of the world.
So I want to bring to your attention, in case you have missed it, the most up-lifting and heart-warming book I have read in long time. It’s titled Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World-and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. It’s written by Hans Rosling, a Swedish medical doctor, who spent his life caring for the underprivileged people of Third World countries and amidst all the deprivation and despair discovered that the human race has been making progress. Progress that matters for the health, education, and the rights of billions of people. To spread the good news, he decided to compile the evidence, using mostly United Nations statistics and tell humanity’s tremendous progress to audiences across the globe in more than a thousand presentations. Unfortunately, this remarkable human being died last year but not before he was able (with the assistance of his son and daughter-in-law) to leave us his findings in this book.
Here is some of the encouraging facts Hans Rosling’s data show about human progress:
- Sixty percent of girls finish primary school in all low-income countries.
- The majority of people live in middle-income countries.
- In the last 20 years the proportion of the world population that lives in extreme poverty has almost halved.
- The average world life expectancy today is 70 years (by the way it was less than 50 years in the 1950s).
- The number of deaths per year from natural disasters has decreased to less than half over the past 100 years.
- Eighty percent of the world’s 1-year old children today have been vaccinated against some disease.
- Worldwide, 30-year old women have spent 10 years in school, on average, versus 10 years for men – almost a parity.
- Today, 80% of the world’s population has access to electricity (which is the gateway to modern life).
These statistics are not driven by progress made in developed countries but mostly by progress made in developing countries. They also suggest the pace of progress is significant over time and although the gap between the developed and developing world is still substantial, it’s not as devastating as usually perceived. Especially improvements in health, female education, and family planning guarantee that the pace of convergence will accelerate as we move forward.
To his surprise, Rosling discovered that these positive developments were not known to supposedly knowledgeable audiences. Ironically, the higher the level of education and prominence, the lower the percentage of correct answers (the full set includes more questions and facts). Rosling attributed this ignorance to a variety of cognitive biases, but the main culprits are (a) the preference of news media to give more coverage to bad news than to positive developments, and (b) the pessimistic view of learned audiences from First World countries about the conditions in Third World countries.
These findings suggest that despite regional conflicts, national antagonisms, and flawed global policies, people are making progress and their living conditions are drawn closer and closer so that the gap between advanced and developing countries is becoming smaller.
So, when you get up in the morning and read or hear some lousy news, remember Hans Rosling’s hopeful and fact-based message: we are making progress.
Note: I will explore some of the implications of Hans Rosling’s findings in future postings.
Let's Reason 
Very refreshing. Thank you for sharing. The truth is that when you watch the news, you are usually bombarded with negative stories so it seems that the world is going to “hell in a handbasket”- when actually that is not true. It’s good to be reminded of the positive stories and progress going on too.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thank you, George. The book gives us hope.
What Charles Dickens wrote about London and Paris in the 18th century still applies today — “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”
There is another book that we should all read. “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined” by Steven Pinker, in which he argues that violence of all forms in the world has experienced massive declines through the ages. Paradoxically, our impression of violence has not tracked this decline. It may be because of increased communication that focuses mostly on bad news. Pinker said that “further decline is not inevitable, but is contingent on forces harnessing our better motivations such as empathy and increases in reason.”
So, George, let’s reason!
LikeLike