Challenging Our Grim Biases.

• Author: Murray, Phil R.
• Position: Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong about the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think - Book review

Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong about the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

By Hans Rosling with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Ronnlund

342 pp.; Flatiron Books, 2018

Factfulness is a family effort. Hans Rosling, who passed away in 2017, was a physician, "a global health professor," a statistician, a dynamic lecturer, and--a crowd-pleasing element of his lectures--a sword swallower. Ola Rosling is his son; Anna Rosling Ronnlund is Hans's daughter-in-law. The trio founded Gapminder, a Swedish foundation that they describe as "a fact tank, not a think tank," intended to fight "devastating misconceptions about global development." When Hans's death left the book unfinished; Ola and Anna stepped in, writing in Hans's voice.

By "factfulness," the authors mean "a set of thinking tools." Likewise, Factfulness "is about the world and how to understand it."

Gap instinct / How much do you know about the world? The Roslings offer a quiz to test your knowledge. Consider one of their questions:

In all low-income countries across the world today, how many girls finish primary school?

1. 20%

2. 40%

3. 60%

The answer is (c), yet the Roslings found that on average just 7% of respondents picked that answer. Note that if people randomly selected an answer, 33% would choose the correct one. The results are similar on other questions. The Roslings summarize: "Everyone seems to get the world devastatingly wrong. Not only devastatingly wrong, but systematically wrong."

The typical Gapminder survey asks 12 such questions, each accompanied by three possible answers. (Test yourself: www.gapminder.org/test/2017.) Again, if answering randomly, the average test-taker should get four of the 12 questions right. The Roslings quizzed thousands of people, who achieved a mean score of 2.2 correct answers. Because 2.2 is statistically significantly below the expected value from guessing, we must conclude that people are not just uninformed, but biased. The Roslings call this bias an "overdramatic worldview" and recommend a "fact-based worldview."

They argue that the overdramatic worldview is based on 10 pitfalls in the way we think. Take the "gap instinct," which they describe as "that irresistible temptation we have to divide all kinds of things into two distinct and often conflicting groups, with an imagined gap--a huge chasm of injustice--in between." We think in terms of rich versus poor. "When people say 'developing' and 'developed,'" they explain, "what they are probably thinking is 'poor countries' and 'rich countries.'" Other divisions include "West/rest [of the world]," "north/ south," and "low-income/high-income."

In their terminology, there are "four income levels." One billion of the world's population live at what they designate as Level 1, with no more...