Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think (26 page)

My lecture seemed to go well. I showed how Asian countries like South Korea, China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Singapore, which had surprised the world with their economic progress over the past decades, actually had made steady social progress during the decades before their economic growth. I showed how the same process was now unfolding in parts of Africa. I said that the best places to invest right now were probably those African countries that had just seen decades of rapid improvements in education and child survival. I mentioned Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Ghana. The audience listened hard, eyes wide, and asked some good questions.

Afterward, as I was packing away my laptop, a gray-haired man in a lightly checked three-piece suit walked slowly up to the stage, smiled sweetly, and said, “Well, I saw your numbers and I heard what you said, but I’m afraid there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that Africa will make it. I know because I served in Nigeria. It’s their culture, you know. It will not allow them to create a modern society. Ever. EV-ER.” I opened my mouth, but before I had figured out a fact-based reply, he had already given my shoulder a little pat and wandered off to find a cup of tea.

The destiny instinct is the idea that innate characteristics determine the destinies of people, countries, religions, or cultures. It’s the idea that things are as they are for ineluctable, inescapable reasons: they have always been this way and will never change. This instinct makes us believe that our false generalizations from chapter 6, or the tempting gaps from chapter 1, are not only true, but fated: unchanging and unchangeable.

It is easy to see how this instinct would have served an evolutionary purpose. Historically, humans lived in surroundings that didn’t change much. Learning how things worked and then assuming they would continue to work that way rather than constantly reevaluating was probably an excellent survival strategy.

It’s also easy to understand how claiming a particular destiny for your group can come in useful in uniting that group around a supposedly never-changing purpose, and perhaps creating a sense of superiority over other groups. Such ideas must have been important for powering tribes, chiefdoms, nations, and empires. But today, this instinct to see things as unchanging, this instinct not to update our knowledge, blinds us to the revolutionary transformations in societies happening all around us.

Societies and cultures are not like rocks, unchanging and unchangeable. They move. Western societies and cultures move, and non-Western societies and cultures move—often much faster. It’s just that all but the fastest cultural changes—the spread of the internet, smartphones, and social media, for example—tend to happen just a bit too slowly to be noticeable or newsworthy.

A common expression of the destiny instinct is my Edinburgh gentleman’s idea that Africa will always be a basket case and will never catch up with Europe. Another is that the “Islamic world” is fundamentally different from the “Christian world.” This or that religion or continent or culture or nation will (or must) never change, because of its traditional and unchanging “values”: again and again, it’s the same idea in different costumes. At first sight there appears to be some analysis going on. On closer inspection, our instincts have often fooled us. These lofty statements are often simply feelings disguised as facts.

By now I hope you have worked out that the safest thing to do in this book is to pick the most positive answer. Thirty-year-old women have on average spent nine years in school, just one year less than the men.

Many of my fellow Europeans have a snobbish self-regard built on an illusion of a European culture that is superior, not only to African and Asian cultures, but also to American consumer culture. When it comes to drama, though, I wonder who consumes the most. Twenty-six percent of the US public picked the right answer, compared with 13 percent in Spain and Belgium, 10 percent in Finland, and just 8 percent in Norway.

The question is about gender inequality, which is currently discussed in the Scandinavian media on a daily basis. We see constant examples of the brutal violence committed against women out there, mostly elsewhere, in the rest of the world, as well as reports from places like Afghanistan, where many, many girls are out of school. These images confirm a popular idea in Scandinavia that gender equality elsewhere has not improved—that most other cultures are stuck.

Cultures, nations, religions, and people are not rocks. They are in constant transformation.

The idea that Africa is destined to remain poor is very common but often seems to be based on no more than a feeling. If you like your opinions to be based on facts, this is what you need to know.

Yes, Africa is lagging behind other continents, on average. The average lifespan of a newborn baby in Africa today is 65 years. That’s a staggering 17 years less than a baby born today in Western Europe.

But, first of all, you know how misleading averages can be, and the differences within Africa are immense. Not all African countries are lagging the world. Five large African countries—Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Libya, and Egypt—have life expectancies above the world average of 72 years. They are where Sweden was in 1970.

Those despairing for Africa may not be convinced by this example. They may say that these are all Arab countries on the north coast of Africa and therefore not the Africa they had in mind. When I was young, these countries were certainly seen as sharing Africa’s destiny. It is only since they made progress that they have been held to be exceptional. For the sake of argument, though, let’s put these North African countries to one side and look at Africa south of the Sahara.

In the last 60 years the African countries south of the Sahara almost all went from being colonies to being independent states. Over that time, these countries expanded their education, electricity, water, and sanitation infrastructures at the same steady speed as that achieved by the countries of Europe when they went through their own miracles. And each of the 50 countries south of the Sahara reduced its child mortality faster than Sweden ever did. How can that not be counted as incredible progress?

Perhaps because though things are much better, they are still bad. If you look for poor people in Africa, of course you will find them.

But there was extreme poverty in Sweden 90 years ago too. And when I was young, just 50 years ago, China, India, and South Korea were all way behind where sub-Saharan Africa is today in most ways, and Asia’s destiny was supposed then to be exactly what Africa’s destiny is supposed to be now: “They will never be able to feed 4 billion people.”

Roughly half a billion people in Africa today are stuck in extreme poverty. If it is their destiny to stay that way, then there must be something unique about this particular group of poor people compared with the billions across the world, including in Africa, who have already escaped extreme poverty. I don’t think there is.

I think the last to leave extreme poverty will be the poorest farmers stuck on really low-yield soils and surrounded by or close to conflicts. That probably accounts today for 200 million people, just over half of whom live in Africa. For sure they have an extraordinarily difficult time ahead of them—not because of their unchanging and unchangeable culture, but because of the soil and the conflicts.

But I hold out hope even for these poorest and most unfortunate people in the world, because this is exactly how hopeless extreme poverty has always seemed. During their terrible famines and conflicts, progress in China, Bangladesh, and Vietnam seemed impossible. Today these countries probably produced most of the clothes in your wardrobe. Thirty-five years ago, India was where Mozambique is today. It is fully possible that within 30 years Mozambique will transform itself, as India has done, into a country on Level 2 and a reliable trade partner. Mozambique has a long, beautiful coast on the Indian Ocean, the future center of global trade. Why should it not prosper?

Nobody can predict the future with 100 percent certainty. I’m not convinced it will happen. But I am a possibilist and these facts convince me: it is possible.

The destiny instinct makes it difficult for us to accept that Africa can catch up with the West. Africa’s progress, if it is noticed at all, is seen as an improbable stroke of good fortune, a temporary break from its impoverished and war-torn destiny.

The same destiny instinct also seems to make us take continuing Western progress for granted, with the West’s current economic stagnation portrayed as a temporary accident from which it will soon recover. For years after the global crash of 2008, the International Monetary Fund continued to forecast 3 percent annual economic growth for countries on Level 4. Each year, for five years, countries on Level 4 failed to meet this forecast. Each year, for five years, the IMF said, “Next year it will get back on track.” Finally, the IMF realized that there was no “normal” to go back to, and it downgraded its future growth expectations to 2 percent. At the same time the IMF acknowledged that the fast growth (above 5 percent) during those years had instead happened in countries on Level 2, like Ghana, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Kenya in Africa, and Bangladesh in Asia.

Why does this matter? One reason is this: the IMF forecasters’ worldview had a strong influence on where your retirement funds were invested. Countries in Europe and North America were expected to experience fast and reliable growth, which made them attractive to investors. When these forecasts turned out to be wrong, and when these countries did not in fact grow fast, the retirement funds did not grow either. Supposedly low-risk/high-return countries turned out to be high-risk/low-return countries. And at the same time African countries with great growth potential were being starved of investment.

Another reason it matters, if you work for a company based in the old “West,” is that you are probably missing opportunities in the largest expansion of the middle-income consumer market in history, which is taking place right now in Africa and Asia. Other, local brands are already establishing a foothold, gaining brand recognition, and spreading throughout these continents, while you are still waking up to what is going on. The Western consumer market was just a teaser for what is coming next.