Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think (37 page)

Most important of all, we should be teaching our children humility and curiosity
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Being humble, here, means being aware of how difficult your instincts can make it to get the facts right. It means being realistic about the extent of your knowledge. It means being happy to say “I don’t know.” It also means, when you do have an opinion, being prepared to change it when you discover new facts. It is quite relaxing being humble, because it means you can stop feeling pressured to have a view about everything, and stop feeling you must be ready to defend your views all the time.

Being curious means being open to new information and actively seeking it out. It means embracing facts that don’t fit your worldview and trying to understand their implications. It means letting your mistakes trigger curiosity instead of embarrassment. “How on earth could I be so wrong about that fact? What can I learn from that mistake? Those people are not stupid, so why are they using that solution?” It is quite exciting being curious, because it means you are always discovering something interesting.

But the world will keep changing, and the problem of ignorant grown-ups will not be solved by teaching the next generation. What you learn about the world at school will become outdated within 10 or 20 years of graduating. So we must find ways to update adults’ knowledge too. In the car industry, cars are recalled when a mistake is discovered. You get a letter from the manufacturer saying, “We would like to recall your vehicle and replace the brakes.” When the facts about the world that you were taught in schools and universities become out of date, you should get a letter too: “Sorry, what we taught you is no longer true. Please return your brain for a free upgrade.” Or perhaps your employer should tackle the problem: “Please go through this material and take this test, to avoid embarrassing yourself at the World Economic Forum or similar.”

A single typo in your CV and you probably don’t get the job. But if you put 1 billion people on the wrong continent you can still get hired. You can even get a promotion.

Most Western employees in large multinationals and financial institutions are still trying to operate according to a deeply rooted, outdated, and distorted worldview. Yet global understanding is becoming more and more crucial, and more and more possible. Most of us now work with consumers, producers, service providers, colleagues, or clients all across the planet. Some decades ago, when it was perhaps less important for us to know about the world, there were almost no reliable and accessible global statistics. As the world changed, though, the need for knowledge about the world also changed. Today, reliable data is easily available for almost every subject. This is quite new: my first partner in the fight against mega misconceptions was a photocopier, but today all that data is freely available online. In recruitment, production, marketing, and investment, it has never been easier or more important for business leaders and employees to act on a fact-based worldview.

Using data to understand the globalized markets has already become part of the culture. But when people’s worldviews are upside down, data snippets can be just as misleading as wrong data or no data. Until one day someone actually tests their global knowledge, everyone assumes they are getting it kind of right.

In sales and marketing, if you run a big business in Europe or the United States, you and your employees need to understand that the world market of the future will be growing primarily in Asia and Africa, not at home.

In recruitment, you need to understand that being a European or American company no longer gives you bragging rights to attract international employees. Google and Microsoft, for example, have become global businesses and made their “Americanness” almost invisible. Their employees in Asia and Africa want to be part of truly global companies and they are. Their CEOs, Sundar Pichai of Google and Satya Nadella of Microsoft, were both raised and educated in India.

When I present to European corporations, I always tell them to tune down their European branding (“remove the Alps from your logo”) and to move their headquarters—but not their European staff—elsewhere.

In production, you need to understand that globalization is not over. Decades ago, Western companies realized that industrial production had to be outsourced to the so-called emerging markets on Level 2, where products could be manufactured at the same quality for less than half the price. However, globalization is a continuing process, not a one-off event. The textiles industry that moved from Europe to Bangladesh and Cambodia as they reached Level 2 some decades ago will most likely soon move again as Bangladesh and Cambodia become wealthier and approach Level 3. These countries will have to diversify or suffer the consequences as their textiles jobs are shifted to African countries.

In making investment decisions, you need to shake off any na
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ve views of Africa shaped by the colonial past (and maintained by today’s media) and understand that Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya are where some of the best investment opportunities can be found today.

I think it will not be long before businesses care more about fact mistakes than they do about speling miskates, and will want to ensure their employees and clients are updating their worldview on a regular basis.

Journalists, activists, and politicians are also humans. They are not lying to us. They suffer from a dramatic worldview themselves. Like everyone else, they should regularly check and update their worldview and develop factful ways of thinking.

There are further actions that journalists can take to help them to present a less distorted worldview to the rest of us. Setting events in their historical context can help to keep them in proportion. Some journalists, aware of the distorting influence of negative news, are outlining new standards for more constructive news, with the goal of changing bad news habits and making journalism more meaningful. It’s hard to tell at this point how much impact they will have.

Ultimately, it is not journalists’ role, and it is not the goal of activists or politicians, to present the world as it really is. They will always have to compete to engage our attention with exciting stories and dramatic narratives. They will always focus on the unusual rather than the common, and on the new or temporary rather than slowly changing patterns.

I cannot see even the highest-quality news outlets conveying a neutral and nondramatic representative picture of the world, as statistics agencies do. It would be correct but just too boring. We should not expect the media to move very far in that direction. Instead it is up to us as consumers to learn how to consume the news more factfully, and to realize that the news is not very useful for understanding the world.

Once a year, the ministers of health from every country come together at the World Health Assembly. They plan health systems and compare health outcomes of different countries and then they have coffee. One time, the minister of health from Mexico whispered in my ear during a coffee break, “I care a lot about Mexico’s average number, one day every year. That is today. All the other 364 days I only care about the differences within Mexico.”

In this book, I have discussed ignorance of facts on a global level. I think there must be systematically ignored facts on the country level too, and in every community and every organization.

So far we have only tried a few local fact questions, but it seems like they follow a very similar pattern to the global facts we have tested more widely. In Sweden, for example, we asked:

The correct answer is 20 percent—no change—but only 10 percent of Swedes picked that answer. That is devastating ignorance about a basic fact that is crucial in our Swedish debate about planning for the next ten years. I think it is because people have heard a lot about the aging population over the last 20 years, when the number did in fact increase, and then they assume a straight line.

There are so many more local and subject area fact questions we would love to try. Do people in your city know the basic proportions and trends that are shaping the future of the place they live in? We don’t know, because we haven’t tested it. But most likely: no.

What about your niche of expertise? If you work on marine life around Scandinavia, do your colleagues know the basic facts about the Baltic Sea? If you work in forestry, do your colleagues know if wildfires are getting more or less common? Do they know whether the latest fires caused more or less damage than those in the past?

We think there are endless such ignorances to discover if the fact questions are asked. Which is exactly why we suggest that as step one. You can hunt for ignorance in your own organization using the same methods we have used. Start simply by asking what are the most important facts in your organization and how many people know them.

Sometimes people get nervous about this. They think their colleagues and friends will be offended if they start checking their knowledge, and will not appreciate being proved wrong. My experience is the opposite. People like it a lot. Most people find it inspiring to realize what the world looks like. Most people are eager to start learning. Testing their knowledge, if it is done in a humble way, can release an avalanche of curiosity and new insights.

I have found fighting ignorance and spreading a fact-based worldview to be a sometimes frustrating but ultimately inspiring and joyful way to spend my life. I have found it useful and meaningful to learn about the world as it really is. I have found it deeply rewarding to try to spread that knowledge to other people. And I have found it so exciting to finally start to understand why spreading that knowledge and changing people’s worldviews have been so damn hard.

Could everyone have a fact-based worldview one day? Big change is always difficult to imagine. But it is definitely possible, and I think it will happen, for two simple reasons. First: a fact-based worldview is more useful for navigating life, just like an accurate GPS is more useful for finding your way in the city. Second, and probably more important: a fact-based worldview is more comfortable. It creates less stress and hopelessness than the dramatic worldview, simply because the dramatic one is so negative and terrifying.