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The Book in One Sentence
- Factfulness is about the ten instincts that distort our perspective of the world and prevent us from seeing how it actually is.
Factfulness Summary
10 Instincts That Distort Our Perspective
- The Gap Instinct. Our tendency to divide things into two distinct and often conflicting groups with an imagined gap between them (e.g. us and them).
- The Negativity Instinct. Our tendency to notice the bad more than the good (e.g. believing that things are getting worse when things are actually getting better).
- The Straight Line Instinct. Our tendency to assume that a line will just continue straight and ignoring that such lines are rare in reality.
- The Fear Instinct. Our hardwired tendency to pay more attention to frightening things.
- The Size Instinct. Our tendency to get things out of proportion, or misjudge the size of things (e.g. we systematically overestimate the proportions of immigrants in our countries.)
- The Generalization Instinct. Our tendency to mistakenly group together things or people, or countries that are actually very different.
- The Destiny Instinct. The idea that innate characteristics determine the destinies of people, countries, religions, or cultures; that things are as they are because of inescapable reasons.
- The Single Perspective. Our tendency to focus on a single cause or perspective when it comes to understanding the world (e.g. forming your worldview by relying on the media, alone).
- The Blame Instinct. Our tendency to find a clear, simple reason for why something bad has happened.
- The Urgency Instinct. Our tendency to take immediate action in the face of perceived imminent danger, and in doing so, amplifying our other instincts.
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Introduction: Why I Love the Circus
Every group of people that Hans Rosling asks thinks that the world is more frightening, more violent, and more hopeless than it really is.
“Step-by-step, year-by-year, the world is improving,” writes Rosling. “Not on every single measure every single year, but as a rule. Though the world faces huge challenges, we have made tremendous progress. This is the fact-based worldview.”
Rosling writes, “We need to learn to control our drama intake. Uncontrolled, our appetite for the dramatic goes too far, prevents us from seeing the world as it is, and leads us terribly astray.”
Chapter One: The Gap Instinct
The gap instinct describes our tendency to divide things into two distinct and often conflicting groups with an imagined gap in between them.
“Eighty-five percent of mankind is already inside the box that used to be named ‘developed world.’ The remaining 15 percent are mostly in between the two boxes. Only 13 countries, representing 6 percent of the world population, are still inside the ‘developing’ box.”
“There is no gap between the West and the rest, between developed and developing, between rich and poor. And we should all stop using the simple pairs of categories that suggest there is.”
“Only 9 percent of the world lives in low-income countries.”
“Low-income countries are much more developed than most people think. And vastly fewer people live in them. The idea of a divided world with a majority stuck in misery and deprivation is an illusion. A complete misconception. Simply wrong.”
“The majority of people live neither in low-income countries nor in high-income countries, but in middle-income countries. This category doesn’t exist in the divided mindset, but in reality, it definitely exists.”
“Dividing countries into two groups no longer make sense,” says Rosling. It doesn’t help us to understand the world in a practical way. Nor does it help businesses find opportunities or aid money to find the poorest people.
Our most important challenge in developing a fact-based worldview, according to Rosling, is to realize that most of our firsthand experiences are from Level 4; and that our secondhand experiences are filtered through the mass media, which loves nonrepresentative extraordinary events and shuns normality.
Factfulness Is …
- … recognizing when a story talks about a gap and remembering that this paints a picture of two separate groups, with a gap in between. The reality is often not polarized at all. Usually, the majority is right there in the middle, where the gap is supposed to be.
- To control the gap instinct, look for the majority.
- Beware comparisons of averages. If you could check the spreads you would probably find they overlap. There is probably no gap at all.
- Beware comparisons of extremes. In all groups, of countries or people, there are some at the top and some at the bottom. The difference is sometimes extremely unfair. But even then the majority is usually somewhere in between, right where the gap is supposed to be.
- The view from up here. Remember, looking down from above dist…