Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think (43 page)

Why refugees don’t fly.
Sweden did not confiscate the boats of those smuggling refugees from Denmark during the Second World War—see the BBC documentary “How the Danish Jews Escaped the Holocaust.” According to Goldberger (1987), 7,220 Danish Jews were saved by these boats. Today, EU Council[1] Directive 2002/90/EC defines “smuggler” as anyone facilitating illegal immigration, and an EU Council[2] framework decision allows “confiscation of the means of transport used to commit the offence.” While the Geneva Conventions say that many of these refugees have the right to asylum, see UNHCR. See gapm.io/p16 and gapm.io/tpref.

CO
₂
emissions.
Researchers are trying to figure out how to adjust emissions quotas for changing population sizes; see Shengmin et al. (2011) and Raupach et al. (2014). See gapm.io/eco2a. For more on CO
₂
emissions at different incomes, see gapm.io/tco2i.

Syphilis.
If you think you are not living in the best of times, search for images of syphilis and you will soon feel blessed. We got the many names of this disgusting disease from Qu
é
tel (1990) via the University of Glasgow Library.

One billion people and Mao.
One billion is a rounded-down approximation of the number of people whose lives were affected by Chairman Mao. In 1949, China’s population was 0.55 billion. Mao ruled the country from 1949 until his death in 1976, during which time another 0.7 billion Chinese people were born, according to UN-Pop[1].

Falling birth rates and powerful leaders.
This interactive chart shows how all countries’ birth rates have fallen since 1800: gapm.io/vm4.

Abortion.
The WHO guidelines on Access to Safe Abortion say: “Restriction in access to safe abortion services results in both unsafe abortions and unwanted births. Almost all deaths and morbidity from unsafe abortion occur in countries where abortion is severely restricted in law and/or in practice.” See WHO[2].

Institutions.
Institutions are best understood through the work performed by the people maintaining them. In their book
Poor Economics,
Banerjee and Duflo (2011) describe the very basic institutions needed to make the escape out of poverty easier. See gapm.io/tgovin.

The governmental employees who saved the world from Ebola.
Dr. Mosoka Fallah was one of the Ebola contact tracers I had the honor of working with in Monrovia. Listen to his own words about the government’s employees and their commitment to their society when it needed them most, and hear him describe how to maintain trust within the community while hunting the infection, in his TEDx Monrovia talk here: gapm.io/x1.

Thank you, industrialization.
See the magic washing machine in action in this TED talk: gapm.io/vid1.

Konzo.
To understand the lives of the villagers and their children suffering from konzo, watch the film by Thorkild Tyllesk
ä
r (1995), recorded in the Bandundu Province, in present-day Democratic Republic of Congo: gapm.io/x2.

Now or never.
Learn to defend yourself against common sales tricks in Robert Cialdini’s
Influence
(2001).

The urgency instinct.
See
Superforecasting,
by Tetlock and Gardner (2015), for more on how difficult it is for us to maintain “maybe,” and therefore a reasonable range of options, in our heads.

The melting ice cap.
The website Greenland Today shows the melting at the North Pole every day; see
https://nsidc.org/greenland-today
.

Fresh numbers for GDP and CO
₂
.
The OECD regularly publishes data for its 35 rich member countries. As of December 2017, the most recent number for GDP growth is from six weeks ago. The most recent number for CO
₂
emissions is from three years ago; see OECD[2]. For Sweden, CO
₂
emissions data that is not older than three months can be found at the website for Sweden’s System of Environmental and Economic Accounts; see SCB.

Climate refugees.
Many studies claim to show that the number of refugees will increase dramatically because of climate change. The UK Government Office for Science study
Migration and Global Environmental Change
(Foresight, 2011) showed fundamental weaknesses in the common assumptions underlying these claims. First it found that most of the frequently quoted studies refer back to just two original sources, one estimating that climate change will create ten million refugees and the other anticipating 150 million refugees; see Box 1.2: “Existing estimates of ‘numbers of environmental migrants’ tend to be based on one or two sources.” And second, it found that these original sources underestimate people living on Levels 1 and 2 and their ability to cope with change. Instead they describe migration as their only option in the face of climate change.

The bad habit of reducing all problems to one single problem—the climate—is called climate reductionism. To confront it is not to deny climate change. It is to have realistic expectations about how people will cope with it, bearing in mind the many examples in world history of humans adapting to new circumstances; see, for example,
The Big Ratchet,
by Ruth DeFries (2014).

For a fact-based picture of the global migration and refugee situation, see UNHCR Population Statistics here:
http://popstats.unhcr.org/en/overview
, and read Paul Collier’s
Exodus
(2013), and Alexander Betts and Paul Collier’s
Refuge
(2017).

Ebola.
The WHO[13] lists all situation reports produced to track the Ebola pandemic since 2014. They still show suspect cases, and the CDC[3] continues to use the high estimates, which include suspected and unconfirmed cases.

The five global risks.
For a fact-based view of a longer list of major risks, see
Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next Fifty Years,
by Smil (2008). For those who find numbers calming, this is where you will find the big picture of the proportional risks and uncertainties of all kinds of possible fatal discontinuities. See gapm.io/furgr.

The risk of global pandemic.
A small version of Spanish flu is more likely than a large one; see Smil (2008). While we should work against the obscene overuse of antibiotics in the meat industry—see WHO[14]—at the same time we must be careful not to make the mistake we made with DDT and become overprotective. Antibiotics could save even more lives if they were even less expensive. See gapm.io/tgerm.

The risk of financial collapse.
During the past ten years, “the external environment is volatile, with capital markets increasingly characterized by more extreme events,” observe Dobbs et al. in
No Ordinary Disruption
(2016). See also Hausmann (2015). See gapm.io/dysec.

The risk of World War III.
In his book (2008), Smil was already discussing ten years ago how six unfolding trends of the new world order were slowly leading to intensified conflicts between parts of the world: Europe’s place, Japan’s decline, Islam’s choice, Russia’s way, China’s rise, and the United States’ retreat. See gapm.io/dysso.

The risk of climate change.
The passage draws on
The Plundered Planet,
by Paul Collier (2010), the thinking of economist Elinor Ostrom and OurWorldInData[7]. See gapm.io/dysna.

The risk of extreme poverty.
The passage draws on World Bank[26], ODI, PRIO, Paul Collier’s
The Bottom Billion
(2007), and the BBC documentary “Don’t Panic—End Poverty” (see Gapminder[11]). While extreme poverty has fallen, the number of extremely poor people living in conflict has been stable or even increased, based on preliminary data from PRIO. If current wars continue, soon the vast majority of extremely poor children will live behind military lines. This poses a cultural challenge to the international aid community; see the Stockholm Declaration (2016). See gapm.io/tepov.

Diversified economies.
MIT has produced a free-of-charge tool (
https://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/
) to help countries work out how best to diversify, given its existing industries and skills; see gapm.io/x4 or read Hausmann et al. (2013).

Teachers.
Visit
www.gapminder.org/teach
to find our free teaching materials and join the community of teachers promoting a fact-based worldview in their classrooms.

Speling miskates.
This typo is intentional, inspired by the fact that oriental rugs should always contain at least one deliberate mistake. At least one knot must always be wrong in every rug. It is to remind us that we are humans and we should not pretend we are perfect. Deliberately, we have no source behind this fact.

Constructive news.
Here are two very different approaches for fixing the news problem:
https://constructiveinstitute.org
and
https://www.wikitribune.com/
.

Local ignorance and data.
Don’t miss Alan Smith’s TEDx talk “Why you should love statistics” where he shows great examples of local misconceptions in the UK. Gapminder is starting to develop localized visualizations, like these about Stockholm. Every bubble represents a small area of the city. Push Play and see how 90 percent of areas are somewhere in the middle, and how most of Stockholm is getting richer and more educated, even as Stockholm political debate often discusses the people living at either extreme, because the differences are disturbingly large. See gapm.io/gswe1.

Free global development data.
Open access to data and research made this book possible. In 1999, the World Bank produced, on a CD-ROM, the most comprehensive set of global statistics ever: “World Development Indicators.” We uploaded the content to our website in our animated bubble graphs to make it easier for people to use. The World Bank got a bit angry, but our argument was that taxpayers had already paid for this official data to be collected; we were just making sure they could reach what they already owned. And we asked, “Don’t you believe in free access to information in order for global market forces to work as they should?” In 2010, the World Bank decided to release all of its data for free (and thanked us for insisting). We presented at the ceremony for their new Open Data platform in May 2010, and since then the World Bank has become the main access point for reliable global statistics; see gapm.io/x6.

This was all possible thanks to Tim Berners-Lee and other early visionaries of the free internet. Sometime after he had invented the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee contacted us, asking to borrow a slide show that showed how a web of linked data sources could flourish (using an image of pretty flowers). We share all of our content for free, so of course we said yes. Tim used this “flower-powerpoint” in his 2009 TED talk—see gapm.io/x6—to help people see the beauty of “The Next Web,” and he uses Gapminder as an example of what happens when data from multiple sources come together; see Berners-Lee (2009). His vision is so bold, we have thus far seen only the early shoots!

Unfortunately, this book uses almost no data from the International Energy Agency (
www.iea.org
), which, together with OECD, still puts price tags on lots of taxpayers’ data. That probably will—and has to—change soon, as energy statistics are way too important to remain so inaccessible.

Abouchakra, Rabih, Ibrahim Al Mannaee, and Mona Hammami Hijazi.
Looking Ahead: The 50 Trends That Matter.
Chart, page 274. Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2016.

Allansson, Marie, Erik Melander, and Lotta Themn
é
r. “Organized violence, 1989–2016.”
Journal of Peace Research
54, no. 4 (2017).

Amnesty.
Death Penalty: Data counting abolitionists for all crimes
. 2007–2016. Accessed November 3, 2017. gapm.io/xamndp17.

Ariely, Dan.
The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone, Especially Ourselves
. New York: Harper, 2012.

.
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
. New York: Harper, 2008.

.
The Upside of Irrationality, The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home
. New York: Harper, 2010.