Factfulness
“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.”
In the last decades of his life Hans Rosling (1948 – 2017) made a world-wide career lecturing to large corporations, Wall Street bankers, hedge fund managers and gatherings of Nobel laureates and heads of states such as in Davos, about the statistics of the world. Rosling´s son invented a software so that you could present statistics with moving, shrinking and growing bubbles in different colors, which made an otherwise boring subject highly entertaining. The program was even sold to Google.
Now, if you want to make a lot of money with people like this, you better tell them what they want to hear, or the invitations may dry up. Rosling´s message is that everything is getting better. Did you know that the number of extremely poor people have halved in the last 20 years? Did you know that the majority of the world´s population do not live in poor countries but in middle-income countries? Did you know that 80% of the world´s 1-year-olds have been vaccinated (against “some” disease)? Everything is getting better. At a slow pace, but it is getting there, so there´s no need to worry. Unless there is an outbreak of Ebola or some such thing.
Rosling is not lying. Everybody can check these statistics themselves on the internet. But, as it is with statistics, you pick some and leave others out. And then there are those less-than-scientific value judgments. What is a “middle-income country”? If you look closely, if you make more than 2 dollars a day you are already there, according to Rosling. Now, if you are lucky, you might even be able to buy a bicycle and go into town and maybe even get a job in one of the garment factories! Imagine that! Progress is there! That progress is so slow that your generation and the next few ones may not live to see it should be of no concern.
Why do the Africans risk their lives as refugees in the middle of all this progress? Because the EU won´t allow them to come by plane. Yes, that is a small part of the answer, but just a very small part and it does not explain why people leave their countries in the first place when there is no war.
In the middle of the book Rosling has two honest pages about an African woman who talked to him after one of his lectures. She said Rosling was a good talker but he had no vision, which he found unfair. Then she said “Do you think Africans will settle with getting rid of extreme poverty and be happy living in only ordinary poverty?”
She said his attitude was the same old European attitude Africans had lived with for centuries. Now, it honors Rosling that he mentions this, but he did not learn anything from it, obviously. On the very next page, as on all the others, he keeps going on as before.
The over 1000-year-old nordic Edda says “One thing I know that never dies – the judgment over a dead man”.
Hans Rosling was born in a working class family. He did many great things as a doctor in Africa and India. But he should have closed his ears to the siren call of fame and Big Money. He became a tranquilizer for the ruling class.
On the whole a very mixed bag. I think he is right about a lot of his thoughts about how to look at the world. He makes great points about the corporate media shapes the narrative; and that the view is very different due to income disparity; and that humans seek bipolar understanding so that it's "us and them", "right or wrong", "true or false" so that we can take sides conflict; and humans tend to see things with a negative bent; and that comfortable people rarely bother to analyze or update the sources of their beliefs. Truthfully there is no doubt that the contributions and donations by the extremely wealthy people, corporations, organizations, foundations, and countries worldwide has elevated the standard of living around the world in very significant ways. They have made the world a better and safer place. But I don't respond well to what began to feel like subliminal persuasion about "all the good things the wealthy folks are doing and we should not judge them; its all helping the world" vibe. In the end Rosling comes across more as a capitalist than a world health worker. And the omitted analysis (and statistics) is as telling as the ones that are included.
