Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think (28 page)

People often tilt their heads and say “it’s our culture” or “it’s their culture,” which gives the impression that it has always been that way and always will be. Then turn your head around and look for some counterexamples. We already discovered that Swedes didn’t always talk about sex. Here are a couple of others.

Many Swedes think of the United States as having very conservative values. But look at how quickly attitudes to homosexuality have changed. In 1996, a minority of 27 percent supported same-sex marriage. Today that number is 72 percent and rising.

Some Americans think of Sweden as a socialist country, but values can change. A few decades ago Sweden carried out what might be the most drastic deregulation ever of a public school system and now allows fully commercial schools to compete and make profits (a brave capitalist experiment).

I started this chapter with a story about a well-dressed ignorant man who didn’t have sufficient vision to see what was possible in Africa. I want to end with something similar. (Spoiler alert: the ignorant man
this
time is me.)

On May 12, 2013, I had the great privilege of addressing 500 women leaders from across the continent at an African Union conference called “The African Renaissance and Agenda for 2063.” What an enormous honor, what a thrill. It was the lecture of my life. In my 30-minute slot in the Plenary Hall of the African Union’s beautiful headquarters in Addis Ababa, I summarized decades of research on female small-scale farmers and explained to these powerful decision makers how extreme poverty could be ended in Africa within 20 years.

Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, the chairwoman of the African Union, sat right in front of me and seemed to be listening attentively. Afterward, she came up and thanked me and I asked her what she thought of my performance. Her answer was a shock.

“Well,” she said, “the graphics were nice, and you are good at talking, but you don’t have any vision.” Her tone was kind, which made what she was saying even more shocking to me.

“What?! You think I lack vision?” I asked in offended disbelief. “But I said that extreme poverty in Africa could be history within 20 years.”

Nkosazana’s response came in a low voice and she spoke without emotions or gestures. “Oh, yes, you talked about eradicating extreme poverty, which is a beginning, but you stopped there. Do you think Africans will settle with getting rid of extreme poverty and be happy living in only ordinary poverty?” She put a firm hand on my arm and looked at me without anger but also without a smile. I saw a strong will to make me understand my shortcomings. “As a finishing remark you said that you hoped your grandchildren would come as tourists to Africa and travel on the new high-speed trains we plan to build. What kind of a vision is that? It is the same old European vision.” Nkosazana looked me straight in my eyes. “It is
my
grandchildren who are going to visit
your
continent and travel on
your
high-speed trains and visit that exotic ice hotel I’ve heard you have up in northern Sweden. It is going to take a long time, we know that. It is going to take lots of wise decisions and large investments. But my 50-year vision is that Africans will be welcome tourists in Europe and not unwanted refugees.” Then she broke into a broad, warm smile. “But the graphics were really nice. Now let’s go and have some coffee.”

Over coffee I reflected on my mistake. I remembered a conversation from 33 years earlier with my first African friend, the Mozambican mining engineer Niherewa Maselina. He had looked at me with that same face. I was working as a doctor in Nacala in Mozambique, and Niherewa had come with us on a family outing to the beach. The coast in Mozambique is unbelievably beautiful and was still hardly exploited and we used to be almost alone there at the weekends. When I saw that there were 15 or 20 families on the mile-long stretch of sand I said, “Oh, what a shame there are so many families on the beach today.” Niherewa grabbed my arm, just as Nkosazana was to do years later, and said, “Hans. My reaction is the opposite. I feel great pain and sadness seeing this beach. Look at the city there in the distance. Eighty thousand people live there, which means 40,000 children. It’s the weekend. And only 40 of them made it to the beach. One in one thousand. When I got my mining education in East Germany, I went to the beaches of Rostock at the weekend, and they were full. Thousands of children having a wonderful time. I want Nacala to be like Rostock. I want all children to go to the beach on a Sunday instead of working in their parents’ fields or sitting in the slums. It will take a long time, but that is what I want.” Then he let go of my arm and helped my children to get their swimming gear out of the car.

Thirty-three years later, addressing the African Union after a professional lifetime of collaboration with African scholars and institutions, I was absolutely convinced that I shared their great vision. I thought I was one of the few Europeans who could see what change was possible. But after delivering the most cherished lecture of my life, I realized that I was still stuck in an old, static, colonial mind-set. In spite of all that my African friends and colleagues had taught me over the years, I was still not really imagining “they” could ever catch up with “us.” I was still failing to see that all people, families, children will struggle hard to achieve just that, so they can also go to the beach.

Factfulness is … recognizing that many things (including people, countries, religions, and cultures) appear to be constant just because the change is happening slowly,
and remembering that even small, slow changes gradually add up to big changes.

To control the destiny instinct,
remember slow change is still change.

Forming your worldview by relying on the media would be like forming your view about me by looking only at a picture of my foot. Sure, my foot is part of me, but it’s a pretty ugly part. I have better parts. My arms are unremarkable but quite fine. My face is OK. It isn’t that the picture of my foot is deliberately lying about me. But it isn’t showing you the whole of me.

Where, then, shall we get our information from if not from the media? Who can we trust? How about experts? People who devote their working lives to understanding their chosen slice of the world? Well, you have to be very careful here too.

We find simple ideas very attractive. We enjoy that moment of insight, we enjoy feeling we really understand or know something. And it is easy to take off down a slippery slope, from one attention-grabbing simple idea to a feeling that this idea beautifully explains, or is the beautiful solution for, lots of other things. The world becomes simple. All problems have a single cause—something we must always be completely against. Or all problems have a single solution—something we must always be for. Everything is simple. There’s just one small issue. We completely misunderstand the world. I call this preference for single causes and single solutions the single perspective instinct.

For example, the simple and beautiful idea of the free market can lead to the simplistic idea that all problems have a single cause—government interference—which we must always oppose; and that the solution to all problems is to liberate market forces by reducing taxes and removing regulations, which we must always support.

Alternatively, the simple and beautiful idea of equality can lead to the simplistic idea that all problems are caused by inequality, which we should always oppose; and that the solution to all problems is redistribution of resources, which we should always support.

It saves a lot of time to think like this. You can have opinions and answers without having to learn about a problem from scratch and you can get on with using your brain for other tasks. But it’s not so useful if you like to understand the world. Being always in favor of or always against any particular idea makes you blind to information that doesn’t fit your perspective. This is usually a bad approach if you like to understand reality.

Instead, constantly test your favorite ideas for weaknesses. Be humble about the extent of your expertise. Be curious about new information that doesn’t fit, and information from other fields. And rather than talking only to people who agree with you, or collecting examples that fit your ideas, see people who contradict you, disagree with you, and put forward different ideas as a great resource for understanding the world. I have been wrong about the world so many times. Sometimes, coming up against reality is what helps me see my mistakes, but often it is talking to, and trying to understand, someone with different ideas.

If this means you don’t have time to form so many opinions, so what? Wouldn’t you rather have few opinions that are right than many that are wrong?

I have found two main reasons why people often focus on a single perspective when it comes to understanding the world. The obvious one is political ideology, and I will come to that later in this chapter. The other is professional.

I love subject experts, and as we all must do, I rely heavily on them to understand the world. When I know, for example, that all population experts agree that population will stop growing somewhere between 10 billion and 12 billion, then I trust that data. When I know, for example, that historians, paleodemographers, and archeologists have all concluded that until 1800, women had on average five or more children but only two survived, I trust that data. When I know that economists disagree about what causes economic growth, that is extremely useful too, because it tells me I must be careful: probably there is not enough useful data yet, or perhaps there is no simple explanation.

I love experts, but they have their limitations. First, and most obviously, experts are experts only within their own field. That can be difficult for experts (and we are all experts in something) to admit. We like to feel knowledgeable and we like to feel useful. We like to feel that our special skills make us generally better.

But …

Highly numerate people (like the super-brainy audience at the Amazing Meeting, an annual gathering of people who love scientific reasoning) score just as badly on our fact questions as everyone else.

Highly educated people (like the readers of
Nature,
one of the world’s finest scientific journals) score just as badly on our fact questions as everyone else, and often even worse.

People with extraordinary expertise in one field score just as badly on our fact questions as everyone else.

I had the honor of attending the 64
^th
Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, and addressing a large group of talented young scientists and Nobel laureates in physiology and medicine. They were the acknowledged intellectual elite of their field, and yet on the question about child vaccination they scored worse than any public polls: 8 percent got the answer right. (After this I never take it for granted that brilliant experts will know anything about closely related fields outside their specializations.)