Factfulness

Subtitled '10 reasons were wrong about the world – and why things are better than you think', this book is a corrective to an over gloomy prognosis of our planetary future based on selective reporting for dramatic effect and widespread ignorance of significant facts. The book begins with a multiple-choice test with three potential answers, giving a chance chimpanzee score of 4/12 – in fact, the majority of people get the answers wrong. For instance, the first question about girls finishing primary school – is it 20/40/60 percent? The answer is 60. With respect to worldwide life expectancy, do you think it is 50, 60 or 70 – the answer is 70. How many of the world's one-year-old children have been vaccinated against some disease? 20/50/80% - the answer is 80. Likewise, for some access to electricity, where the options of 20/50/80, the answer is 80. What about the proportion of world population living in extreme poverty in the last 20 years – has this almost doubled/remained roughly the same/almost halved. The answer is almost halved, largely driven by progress in China and India. In 1997, 42% of their population were living in extreme poverty, defined as an income of less than one dollar a day, while by 2017 this had fallen to 12% in India (270 million drop) and a mere 0.7% in China - these figures in turn create a new challenge of rising demand for meat in the emerging middle class.

The book is structured on illustrating the impact of 10 misleading instincts - gaps using only two categories when most people are in the middle, negativity, straight line extrapolation, fear, size, generalisation, destiny, single perspective, blame and urgency. Separately and combined, these instincts distort our perception and each has a factfulness corrective. A very useful tool is the four levels of income (p. 34 and inside back cover) at under $1 a day, under $8 a day, under $32 a day and over $32. At the moment, the majority of people are level 2, but this will be level 3 by 2040, with 1.7 billion people on level 4 as compared with 800 million at present. Things may be reported as bad, many things are in fact getting better, although this is unlikely to be reflected in the media any time soon as much good news involves either slow change or is insufficiently dramatic. While it is true that the world population curve is flattening out with 2.5 babies born per woman and that there will be only 2 billion children in 2100 - the same figure as now - there is a projected overall population of 11 billion, and the authors do not address the issue of how we are going to manage these numbers (much of the increase is forecast to be in Africa). We are already consuming the equivalent of 1.6 planets a year. Hence my initial sentence about the book being an encouraging corrective to our thinking, but this should not make us complacent about the challenges we face.