Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think (27 page)

At the end of my opening lecture in my 1998 course on global health, most students headed for the coffee machine but one remained behind. I saw her wander slowly toward the front of the room with tears in her eyes, then, when she understood that I had noticed her, she stopped, flipped her face away, and looked out the window. She was obviously moved. I expected her to share with me a sad personal problem that was going to impede her participation in the course. Before I could say anything comforting she turned around, gained control over her emotions, and in a steady voice said something completely unexpected:

“My family is from Iran. What you just said about the fast improvements in health and education in Iran was the first positive thing I’ve heard anyone from Sweden ever say about the Iranian people.”

My student said this to me in perfect Swedish with a clear Stockholm accent: she had obviously lived in Sweden her whole life. I was stunned. All I had done was to briefly show UN data for Iran on the increase in life expectancy and decrease in babies per woman. I had mentioned too that it was quite an achievement—actually the fastest drop ever, from more than six babies per woman in 1984 down to fewer than three babies per woman just 15 years later.

It was one of several little-known examples I had shown of fast changes in middle-income countries in the 1990s.

“That can’t be true,” I said.

“It is. You said that the fast fall in the number of babies per woman in Iran is a reflection of improvements in health and education, especially for Iranian women. You also rightly said that most young Iranians now have modern values about family size and use contraception. I have never heard anyone in Sweden say anything even close to that. Even highly educated Swedes seem completely unaware of the changes that have taken place. The improvements. The modernity. They think Iran is on the same level as Afghanistan.”

The fastest drop in babies per woman in world history went completely unreported in the free Western media. Iran—home in the 1990s to the biggest condom factory in the world, and boasting a compulsory pre-marriage sex education course for both brides and grooms—has a highly educated population with excellent access to an advanced public health-care system. Couples use contraception to achieve small families and have access to infertility clinics if they struggle to conceive. At least that was the case when I visited such a clinic in Tehran in 1990, hosted by the enthusiastic Professor Malek-Afzali, who designed Iran’s family planning miracle.

How many people in the West would guess that women in Iran today decide to have fewer babies than women in either the United States or Sweden? Do we Westerners love free speech so much that it makes us blind to any progress in a country whose regime does not share our love? It is, at least, clear that a free media is no guarantee that the world’s fastest cultural changes will be reported.

Almost every religious tradition has rules about sex, so it is easy to understand why so many people assume that women in some religions give birth to more children. But the link between religion and the number of babies per woman is often overstated. There is, though, a strong link between income and number of babies per woman.

Back in 1960 this didn’t seem so obvious. In 1960, there were 40 countries where women had fewer than 3.5 babies on average, and they were all Christian-majority countries, except Japan. It appeared that to have few babies, you had either to be Christian or Japanese. (A bit more reflection even at this stage would have suggested some problems with this line of thought: in many Christian-majority countries, like Mexico and Ethiopia, women also had big families.)

How does it look today? In the bubble graphs on the next page, I have divided the world into three groups based on religion: Christian, Muslim, or other. I have then shown babies per woman and income for each group. As usual the size of the bubble reflects the size of the population. Look how Christian populations are spread out on all income levels. Look how the Christian populations on Level 1 have many more babies. Now look at the other two graphs. The pattern is very similar: regardless of religion, women have more children if they live in extreme poverty on Level 1.

Today, Muslim women have on average 3.1 children. Christian women have 2.7. There is no major difference between the birth rates of the great world religions.

In almost every bedroom, across continents, cultures, and religions—in the United States, Iran, Mexico, Malaysia, Brazil, Italy, China, Indonesia, India, Colombia, Bangladesh, South Africa, Libya, you name it—couples are whispering into each other’s ears their dreams for their future happy families.

Exaggerated claims that people from this religion or that religion have bigger families are one example of how people tend to claim that certain values or behaviors are culture-specific, unchanging and unchangeable.

It’s just not true. Values change all the time.

Take my lovely home country, Sweden. We Swedes are known for being quite liberal and open about sex and contraception, aren’t we? Yet this hasn’t always been our culture. These haven’t always been our values.

In my own living memory, Swedish values around sex were extremely conservative. My father’s father, Gustav, for example, was born as Sweden was leaving Level 2 and was, I believe, a quite typical Swedish man of his generation. He was extremely proud of his large family of seven children; he never changed a diaper, cooked food, or cleaned the house; and he absolutely would not talk about sex or contraception. His oldest daughter supported the brave feminists who illegally started advocating the use of condoms in the 1930s. But when she approached her father after the birth of his seventh child, wanting to discuss contraception, this kind, calm man got very angry and refused to talk. His values were traditional and patriarchal. But they were not adopted by the next generation. Swedish culture changed. (By the way, he also disliked books and refused to use a telephone.)

A woman’s right to an abortion is supported by just about everyone in Sweden today. Strong support for women’s rights in general has become part of our culture. My students’ jaws drop when I tell them how different things were when I was a student in the 1960s. Abortion in Sweden was still, except on very limited grounds, illegal. At the university, we ran a secret fund to pay for women to travel abroad to get safe abortions. Jaws drop even further when I tell the students where these young pregnant students traveled to: Poland. Catholic Poland. Five years later, Poland banned abortion and Sweden legalized it. The flow of young women started to go the other way. The point is, it was not always so. The cultures changed.

I come across the values of stubborn old men like my grandfather Gustav all the time when I travel in Asia. For example, in South Korea and Japan, many wives are still expected to take care of their husband’s parents, as well as taking full responsibility for the care of any children. I have encountered many men who are proud of these “Asian values,” as they call them. I have had conversations with many women too, who see it differently. They find this culture unbearable and tell me these values make them less interested in getting married.

I try to comfort these women, to convince them that things will change. I recently gave a lecture to 400 young women at the Asian University for Women in Bangladesh. I told them about how and why cultures are always transforming, how escape from extreme poverty and women’s access to education and contraception have led to more pillow talk and fewer children. It was a very emotional lecture. The young women in colorful hijabs smiled with their whole faces.

Afterward, the Afghan students wanted to tell me about their country. They told me these changes were already slowly happening even in Afghanistan. “Despite the war, despite the poverty,” they told me, “many of us young people are planning a modern life. We are Afghans, we are Muslim women. And we want a man just like you describe, a man who listens and plans together with us, and then we want two children who go to school.”

The macho values that are found today in many Asian and African countries, these are not Asian values, or African values. They are not Muslim values. They are not Eastern values. They are patriarchal values like those found in Sweden only 60 years ago, and with social and economic progress they will vanish, just as they did in Sweden. They are not unchangeable.

How can we help our brains to see that rocks move; that the way things are now is neither how they have always been nor how they are always meant to be?

Societies and cultures are in constant movement. Even changes that seem small and slow add up over time: 1 percent growth each year seems slow but it adds up to a doubling in 70 years; 2 percent growth each year means doubling in 35 years; 3 percent growth each year means doubling in 24 years.

In the third century
BC
, the world’s first nature reserve was created by King Devanampiya Tissa in Sri Lanka when he declared a piece of forest to be officially protected. It took more than 2,000 years for a European, in West Yorkshire, to get a similar idea, and another 50 years before Yellowstone National Park was established in the United States. By the year 1900, 0.03 percent of the Earth’s land surface was protected. By 1930 it was 0.2 percent. Slowly, slowly, decade by decade, one forest at a time, the number climbed. The annual increase was absolutely tiny, almost imperceptible. Today a stunning 15 percent of the Earth’s surface is protected, and the number is still climbing.

To control the destiny instinct, don’t confuse slow change with no change. Don’t dismiss an annual change—even an annual change of only 1 percent—because it seems too small and slow.

It’s relaxing to think that knowledge has no sell-by date: that once you have learned something, it stays fresh forever and you never have to learn it again. In the sciences like math and physics, and in the arts, that is often true. In those subjects, what we all learned at school (2
+
2
=
4) is probably still good. But in the social sciences, even the most basic knowledge goes off very quickly. As with milk or vegetables, you have to keep getting it fresh. Because everything changes.

I have been caught out by this even in my own work. Thirteen years after I first asked them, we planned to rerun my very first chimpanzee questions from 1998 to see whether people’s knowledge had improved. In these questions, I showed five pairs of countries and asked which country in each pair had the highest child mortality rate. Back in 1998, my Swedish students had answered incorrectly because they couldn’t imagine that Asian countries were better than European countries.

When we pulled the questions up, after only 13 years, we realized that it was going to be impossible to rerun the test because the correct answers had changed. Because the world had changed. How illustrative was this? Even Gapminder’s own fact questions had become outdated.

To control the destiny instinct, stay open to new data and be prepared to keep freshening up your knowledge.

If you are tempted to claim that values are unchanging, try comparing your own with those of your parents, or your grandparents—or your children or your grandchildren. Try getting hold of public opinion polls for your country from 30 years ago. You will almost certainly see radical change.