Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think (29 page)

Being intelligent—being good with numbers, or being well educated, or even winning a Nobel Prize—is not a shortcut to global factual knowledge. Experts are experts only within their field.

And sometimes “experts” are not experts even in their own fields. Many activists present themselves as experts. I have presented at all kinds of activist conferences because I believe educated activists can be absolutely crucial for improving the world. Recently I presented at a conference on women’s rights. I strongly support their cause. Two hundred ninety-two brave young feminists had traveled to Stockholm from across the world to coordinate their struggle to improve women’s access to education. But only 8 percent knew that 30-year-old women have spent on average only one year less in school than 30-year-old men.

I am absolutely not saying that everything is OK with girls’ education. On Level 1, and especially in a small number of countries, many girls still do not go to primary school, and there are huge problems with girls’ and women’s access to secondary and higher education. But in fact, on Levels 2, 3, and 4, where 6 billion people live, girls are going to school as much as, or more than, boys. This is something amazing! It is something that activists for women’s education should know and celebrate.

I could have picked other examples. This is not about activists for women’s rights, in particular. Almost every activist I have ever met, whether deliberately or, more likely, unknowingly, exaggerates the problem to which they have dedicated themselves.

Humans have plundered natural resources across the planet. Natural habitats have been destroyed and many animals hunted to extinction. This is clear. But activists who devote themselves to protecting vulnerable animals and their habitats tend to make the same mistake I’ve just described: desperately trying to make people care, they forget about progress.

A serious problem requires a serious database. I strongly recommend visiting the Red List, where you can access the status of all endangered species in the world, as updated by a global community of high-quality researchers who track the wild populations of different animals and collaborate to monitor the trend. Guess what? If I check the Red List or World Wildlife Fund (WWF) today, I can see how, despite declines in some local populations and some subspecies, the total wild populations of tigers, giant pandas, and black rhinos have all increased over the past years. It was worth paying for all those panda stickers on the doors all around Stockholm. Yet only 6 percent of the Swedish public knows that their support has had any effect.

There has been progress in human rights, animal protection, women’s education, climate awareness, catastrophe relief, and many other areas where activists raise awareness by saying that things are getting worse. That progress is often largely thanks to these activists. Maybe they could achieve even more, though, if they did not have such a singular perspective—if they had a better understanding themselves of the progress that had been made, and a greater willingness to communicate it to those they seek to engage. It can be energizing to hear evidence of progress rather than a constant restatement of the problem. UNICEF, Save the Children, Amnesty, and the human rights and environmental movements miss this opportunity again and again.

You probably know the saying “give a child a hammer and everything looks like a nail.”

When you have valuable expertise, you like to see it put to use. Sometimes an expert will look around for ways in which their hard-won knowledge and skills can be applicable beyond where it’s actually useful. So, people with math skills can get fixated on the numbers. Climate activists argue for solar everywhere. And physicians promote medical treatment where prevention would be better.

Great knowledge can interfere with an expert’s ability to see what actually works. All these solutions are great for solving some problem, but none of them will solve all problems. It is better to look at the world in lots of different ways.

I don’t love numbers. I am a huge,
huge
fan of data, but I don’t love it. It has its limits. I love data only when it helps me to understand the reality behind the numbers, i.e., people’s lives. In my research, I have needed the data to test my hypotheses, but the hypotheses themselves often emerged from talking to, listening to, and observing people. Though we absolutely need numbers to understand the world, we should be highly skeptical about conclusions derived purely from number crunching.

The prime minister of Mozambique from 1994 to 2004, Pascoal Mocumbi, visited Stockholm in 2002 and told me that his country was making great economic progress. I asked him how he knew; after all, the quality of the economic statistics in Mozambique was probably not very good. Had he looked at GDP per capita?

“I do look at those figures,” he said. “but they are not so accurate. So I have also made it a habit to watch the marches on May first every year. They are a popular tradition in our country. And I look at people’s feet, and what kind of shoes they have. I know that people do their best to look good on that day. I know that they cannot borrow their friend’s shoes, because their friend will be out marching too. So I look. And I can see if they walk barefoot, or if they have bad shoes, or if they have good shoes. And I can compare what I see with what I saw last year.

“Also, when I travel across the country, I look at the construction going on. If the grass is growing over new foundations, that is bad. But if they keep putting new bricks on, then I know people have money to invest, not just to consume day to day.”

A wise prime minister looks at the numbers, but not
only
at the numbers.

And of course some of the most valued and important aspects of human development cannot be measured in numbers at all. We can estimate suffering from disease using numbers. We can measure improvements in material living conditions using numbers. But the end goal of economic growth is individual freedom and culture, and these values are difficult to capture with numbers. The idea of measuring human progress in numbers seems completely bizarre to many people. I often agree. The numbers will never tell the full story of what life on Earth is all about.

The world cannot be understood without numbers. But the world cannot be understood with numbers alone.

Medical professionals can become very single-minded about medicine, or even a particular kind of medicine.

In the 1950s, a Danish public health doctor, Halfdan Mahler, suggested to the World Health Organization a way to eradicate tuberculosis. His project sent small buses with X-ray machines trundling around villages in India. It was a simple idea: eradicate one disease, and it’s gone. The plan was to X-ray the whole population, find those with TB, and treat them. But it failed because the people got angry. They all had tons of urgent health problems, and finally here was a bus with nurses and doctors. But instead of fixing a broken bone, or giving fluids for diarrhea, or helping a woman in childbirth, they wanted to X-ray everyone for a disease they had never heard of.

Out of the failure of this attempt to eradicate one single disease came the insight that, instead of fighting this disease or that disease, it is wiser to provide and gradually improve primary health care for all.

In another part of the medical world, the profits of Big Pharma companies have been dropping. Most of them are fixated on developing a new, revolutionary, life-prolonging medicine. I try to persuade them that the next big boost in world life expectancy (and their profits) will probably come not from a pharmacological breakthrough but from a business model breakthrough. Big Pharma is currently failing to reach huge markets in countries on Levels 2 and 3, where hundreds of millions of people, like the diabetes patient we met in Kerala, need drugs that have already been discovered, but at more reasonable prices. If the pharmaceutical companies were better at adjusting their prices for different countries and different customers, they could make their next fortune with what they already have.

Experts in maternal mortality who understand the point about hammers and nails can see that the most valuable intervention for saving the lives of the poorest mothers is not training more local nurses to perform C-sections, or better treatment of severe bleeding or infections, but the availability of transport to the local hospital. The hospitals were of limited use if women could not reach them: if there were no ambulances, or no roads for the ambulances to travel on. Similarly, educators know that it is often the availability of electricity rather than more textbooks or even more teachers in the classroom that has the most impact on learning, as students can do their homework after sunset.