First things first: if you’ve never seen any of Hans Rosling’s TED Talks, please watch this one. His talks are far more important than my newsletter.
The late Dr. Hans Rosling was a visionary. A physician, teacher, and statistician, he challenged millions of peoples’ biased notions about poverty, development, and population growth. He did not do this through lectures or lengthy presentations but by using insightful and clever visualizations. Rosling, together with his son and daughter-in-law, co-founded the Gapminder Foundation and developed tools and software’s to convert international statistics into moving, interactive graphics.
This book as Hans wrote in his own words ‘is my last battle in fighting global ignorance’. He wrote factfulness in the last few months of his life while battling pancreatic cancer.
Factfulness is a call to action - to dispel biases and instincts that get in our way of clear logical thinking and make us jump to dramatic and often wrong conclusions. Hans writes about the 10 instincts that have to be consciously resisted every time we look at information or news. For each instinct, he demonstrates how it leads us to develop an inaccurate world view and bias when presented with information. He also shares how to overcome instinct.
For instance, to counter a blame instinct, you have to take a step back and ask yourself what systems made this possible instead of blaming people. If a pharma company is not investing in low-cost malaria medicine research or common diseases vaccine which affects low-income communities it’s not the CEO at fault. The CEO reports to a board that reports to shareholders.
Who owns the shares in big pharma companies? Not the rich
Its the retirement funds. Of our grandparents and seniors citizens.
Another instinct I read about early on into the book was the gap instinct - our tendency to dichotomize. In Hans own words:
“..human beings have a strong dramatic instinct toward binary thinking, a basic urge to divide things into two distinct groups, with nothing but an empty gap in between. We love to dichotomize. Good versus bad. Heroes versus villains. My country versus the rest. Dividing the world into two distinct sides is simple and intuitive, and also dramatic because it implies conflict, and we do it without thinking, all the time…”
Hans shows how data presented in a certain way demonstrates gaps that otherwise don’t exist. When we use averages to show differences between two things (say the Math SAT scores of men and women ) they often lead to inaccurate conclusions (such as men do better than women on Math SAT). However, if you were to look at the data as a range you’ll notice there is no gap. There is actually overlap and that tells a very different story.
One of the popular themes that run through the book and many of Hans TED Talks too is it’s wrong and meaningless to look at the world as developing and developed because these two categories have become obsolete - the gap no longer exists like that.
Instead, he presents a framework of four income levels. Level 1 is extreme poverty, with around 800 million people, who live on less than $2 a day. A billion people live on level 4. But the majority of the world, 5 of 7 billion, live in the middle.
If you have access to an internet connection and the privilege of owning a device to read this article on - congrats you’re already on level 4.
This matters greatly because it’s very hard to look at progress if you divide the world into just rich and poor countries. If those are the only options you’re more likely to think that anyone who does not have a certain quality of life, by your standards, is ‘poor’.
Rosling uses these four levels as a framework when talking about life expectancy, child mortality, education, and other issues in global health and development. It is a very powerful way of looking at stats because you learn that within these levels, over the decades, there has been significant progress.
Over the past week, I have found myself using a lot of techniques mentioned in the book to question a lot of overdramatized and inaccurate reporting by the media (are COVID-19 cases actually accelerating in Pakistan compared to Italy or Spain? how? are we looking at day 65 of Italy and Spain when compared with day 65 of Pakistan? does it make sense to compare present-day cases in Italy and Spain with present-day data Pakistan when all three countries are on different outbreak timeline and lockdown trajectories? )
“Forming your worldview by relying on the media would be like forming your view about me by looking only at a picture of my foot.”
Factfulness has received a lot of acclaims as much as it has received criticisms. If someone tells you the world is getting better your first instinct is to counter it with how its getting worse. I read this book with a grain of salt and I tried to cross-check most of the stats and if they were cherry-picked (the book was published in 2017 so some numbers have changed). I strongly agree with most of what Hans writes about while nursing apprehensions about his position on certain issues like climate change.
But nevertheless, it is an incredible book that has driven me to change the way I look at the world and information (or make an effort at least). I hope most of you will endeavor to read it.
The Best Hans Rosling Talks
A Ted Talks playlist in memory of a great man and the numbers he loved
Book suggestions that came out of reading Factfulness
The Moment of Lift by Melinda Gates (I read this a few months ago - you can catch my review here)
How well do you understand the world and your own biases
Take the Gapminder Test
Learn more about Gapminder
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Zeenat Haroon Rashid Writing Prize is now open for submissions
A Netflix documentary I would highly recommend is Becoming - based on Michelle Obamas bestselling Memoir.
Wrapping it up with this fav by Aarish
Stay home, Stay safe - order in some McDonald’s spicy chicken :)
Saima
Hi;
Me again. Seems like I would leave a comment again before I start writing my own newsletter :)
Nicely written. I am gonna get my hands on that book. I like seeing things not in a black and white way (We electrical engineers say: Life is not digital. It's analog). On that topic, My favorite book has been Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahnemann. If you have not read that you are missing out.
On to some critique: I found a disconnect in the writing. You did give an example from the book to explain a point, but with no conclusion rather you go into more examples. I had to read more than twice to understand. Well, My opinion. Just what I felt.