Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think (21 page)

To avoid getting things out of proportion you need only two magic tools: comparing and dividing. What did you say? You already know both of them? Great, then all you need is to start using them. Make it a habit! I’ll show you how.

The most important thing you can do to avoid misjudging something’s importance is to avoid lonely numbers. Never, ever leave a number all by itself. Never believe that one number on its own can be meaningful. If you are offered one number, always ask for at least one more. Something to compare it with.

Be especially careful about big numbers. It is a strange thing, but numbers over a certain size, when they are not compared with anything else, always look big. And how can something big not be important?

Last year, 4.2 million babies died.

That is the most recent number reported by UNICEF of deaths before the age of one, worldwide. We often see lonely and emotionally charged numbers like this in the news or in the materials of activist groups or organizations. They produce a reaction.

Who can even imagine 4.2 million dead babies? It is so terrible, and even worse when we know that almost all died from easily preventable diseases. And how can anyone argue that 4.2 million is anything other than a huge number? You might think that nobody would even try to argue that, but you would be wrong. That is exactly why I mentioned this number. Because it is
not
huge: it is beautifully small.

If we even start to think about how tragic each of these deaths is for the parents who had waited for their newborn to smile, and walk, and play, and instead had to bury their baby, then this number could keep us crying for a long time. But who would be helped by these tears? Instead let’s think clearly about human suffering.

The number 4.2 million is for 2016. The year before, the number was 4.4 million. The year before that, it was 4.5 million. Back in 1950, it was 14.4 million. That’s almost 10 million more dead babies per year, compared with today. Suddenly this terrible number starts to look smaller. In fact the number has never been lower.

Of course, I am the first person to wish the number was even lower and falling even faster. But to know how to act, and how to prioritize resources, nothing can be more important than doing the cool-headed math and realizing what works and what doesn’t. And this is clear: more and more deaths are being prevented. We would never realize that without comparing the numbers.

The Vietnam War was the Syrian war of my generation.

Two days before Christmas in 1972, seven bombs killed 27 patients and members of staff at the Bach Mai hospital in Hanoi in Vietnam. I was studying medicine in Uppsala in Sweden. We had plenty of medical equipment and yellow blankets. Agneta and I coordinated a collection, which we packed in boxes and sent to Bach Mai.

Fifteen years later, I was in Vietnam to evaluate a Swedish aid project. One lunchtime, I was eating my rice next to one of my local colleagues, a doctor named Niem, and I asked him about his background. He told me he had been inside the Bach Mai hospital when the bombs fell. Afterward, he had coordinated the unpacking of boxes of supplies that had arrived from all over the world. I asked him if he remembered some yellow blankets and I got goose bumps as he described the fabric’s pattern to me. It felt like we had been friends forever.

At the weekend, I asked Niem to show me the monument to the Vietnam War. “You mean the ‘Resistance War Against America,’” he said. Of course, I should have realized he wouldn’t call it the Vietnam War. Niem drove me to one of the city’s central parks and showed me a small stone with a brass plate, three feet high. I thought it was a joke. The protests against the Vietnam War had united a generation of activists in the West. It had moved me to send blankets and medical equipment. More than 1.5 million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans had died. Was this how the city commemorated such a catastrophe? Seeing that I was disappointed, Niem drove me to see a bigger monument: a marble stone, 12 feet high, to commemorate independence from French colonial rule. I was still underwhelmed.

Then Niem asked me if I was ready to see the proper war monument. He drove a little way further, and pointed out of the window. Above the treetops I could see a large pagoda, covered in gold. It seemed about 300 feet high. He said, “Here is where we commemorate our war heroes. Isn’t it beautiful?” This was the monument to Vietnam’s wars with China.

The wars with China had lasted, on and off, for 2,000 years. The French occupation had lasted 200 years. The “Resistance War Against America” took only 20 years. The sizes of the monuments put things in perfect proportion. It was only by comparing them that I could understand the relative insignificance of “the Vietnam War” to the people who now live in Vietnam.

Mari Larsson was 38 years old when she was killed by multiple blows to the head from an axe. It was the night of October 17, 2004. Mari’s former partner had broken into her house in the small town of Pite
å
in the north of Sweden and was waiting for her to come home. The tragic and brutal murder of a mother of three was barely reported in the national media and even the local newspaper gave it only modest coverage.

That same day a 40-year-old father of three, also living in the far north of Sweden, was killed by a bear while out hunting. His name was Johan Vesterlund and he was the first person killed by a bear in Sweden since 1902. This brutal, tragic, and, crucially, rare event received massive coverage throughout Sweden.

In Sweden, a fatal bear attack is a once-in-a-century event. Meanwhile, a woman is killed by her partner every 30 days. This is a 1,300-fold difference in magnitude. And yet one more domestic murder had barely registered, while the hunting death was big news.

Despite what the media coverage might make us think, each death was equally tragic and horrendous. Despite what the media might make us think, people who care about saving lives should be much more concerned about domestic violence than about bears.

It seems obvious when you compare the numbers.

It is not only bears and axes that the news media gets out of proportion.

In 1918 the Spanish flu killed around 2.7 percent of the world population. The risk of an outbreak of a flu against which we have no vaccine remains a constant threat, which we should all take extremely seriously. In the first months of 2009, thousands of people died from the swine flu. For two weeks it was all over the news. Yet, unlike with Ebola in 2014, the number of cases did not double. It did not even go up in a straight line. I and others concluded this flu was not as aggressive as the first alarm had indicated. But journalists kept the fear boiling for several weeks.

Finally I got tired of the hysteria and calculated the rate of news reports versus fatalities. Over a period of two weeks, 31 people had died from swine flu, and a news search on Google brought up 253,442 articles about it. That was 8,176 articles per death. Over the same two-week period, I calculated that roughly 63,066 people had died of tuberculosis (TB). Almost all these people were on Levels 1 and 2, where TB remains a major killer even though it can now be treated. But TB is infectious and TB strains can become resistant and kill many people on Level 4. The news coverage for TB was at a rate of 0.1 article per death. Each swine flu death received 82,000 times more attention than each equally tragic death from TB.

It’s so easy to get things out of proportion, but luckily there are also some easy solutions. Whenever I have to compare lots of numbers and work out which are the most important, I use the simplest-ever thinking tool. I look for the largest numbers.

That is all there is to the 80/20 rule. We tend to assume that all items on a list are equally important, but usually just a few of them are more important than all the others put together. Whether it is causes of death or items in a budget, I simply focus first on understanding those that make up 80 percent of the total. Before I spend time on the smaller ones, I ask myself: Where are the 80 percent? Why are these so big? What are the implications?

For example, here’s a list of the world’s energy sources, in alphabetical order: biofuels, coal, gas, geothermal, hydro, nuclear, oil, solar, wind. Presented like that, they all seem equally important. If we instead sort them according to how many units of energy they generate for humanity, three outnumber all the rest, as this graph shows.

To give myself the big picture I would use the 80/20 rule, which tells us that oil
+
coal
+
gas give us more than 80 percent of our energy: 87 percent in fact.

I first discovered how useful the 80/20 rule is when I started to review aid projects for the Swedish government. In most budgets, around 20 percent of the lines sum up to more than 80 percent of the total. You can save a lot of money by making sure you understand these lines first.

Doing just that is how I discovered that half the aid budget of a small health center in rural Vietnam was about to be spent on 2,000 of the wrong kind of surgical knives. It’s how I discovered that 100 times too much—4 million liters—of baby formula was about to be sent to a refugee camp in Algeria. And it is how I stopped 20,000 testicular prostheses from being sent to a small youth clinic in Nicaragua. In each case I simply looked for the biggest single items taking up 80 percent of the budget, then dug down into any that seemed unusual. In each case the problem was due to a simple confusion or tiny error such as a missing decimal point.

The 80/20 rule is as easy as it seems. You just have to remember to use it. Here’s one more example.

We can understand the world better, and make better decisions about it, if we know where the biggest proportion of the population lives now and where it will live in the future. Where is the world market? Where are the internet users? Where will tourists come from in the future? Where are most of the cargo ships going? And so on.

This is one of the fact questions where people score best. They are almost as good as the chimps. Their answers are almost as good as random. By this point in the book, that looks like a great achievement. You see, it all depends on how you compare!

Seventy percent of people still pick the wrong maps, showing 1 billion people on the wrong continent. Seventy percent of people don’t know that the majority of mankind lives in Asia. If you really care about a sustainable future or the plundering of our planet’s natural resources or the global market, how can you afford to lose track of a billion people?

The correct map is A. The PIN code of the world is 1-1-1-4. That’s how to remember the map. From left to right, the number of billions, as a PIN code. Americas: 1, Europe: 1, Africa: 1, Asia: 4. (I have rounded the numbers.) Like all PIN codes, this one will change. By the end of this century, the UN expects there to have been almost no change in the Americas and Europe but 3 billion more people in Africa and 1 billion more in Asia. By 2100 the new PIN code of the world will be 1-1-4-5. More than 80 percent of the world’s population will live in Africa and Asia.

If the UN forecasts for population growth are correct, and if incomes in Asia and Africa keep growing as now, then the center of gravity of the world market will shift over the next 20 years from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. Today, the people living in rich countries around the North Atlantic, who represent 11 percent of the world population, make up 60 percent of the Level 4 consumer market. Already by 2027, if incomes keep growing worldwide as they are doing now, then that figure will have shrunk to 50 percent. By 2040, 60 percent of Level 4 consumers will live outside the West. Yes, I think the Western domination of the world economy will soon be over.