If you’re on the fence about the book, check out the Factfulness quiz. You’ll get most of the questions wrong.

Fortunately, Rosling doesn’t try to correct your ignorance by throwing facts at you. He provides you with new mental models to think about the world with that are more accurate and just as easy to remember. Here’s a summary (italicized text comes directly from the book).

The Gap Instinct

We often hear stories about the extremes and don’t realize the majority lies in the middle (hence, the gap). Example: we tend to think of countries as either rich or poor (the West and the rest), but it’s more accurate to divide countries into four levels of wealth (click here for further explanation).

Other tips:
–Beware comparisons of averages. You lose nuance in doing so, so visualize the whole data set.
–Beware comparisons of extremes. Even less helpful than comparing averages.
–The view from up here. When you’re rich (which most of us are, compared to most of the world), it’s hard to see nuance in the levels of wealth of people poorer than us. Avoid making blanket statements about “those people”.

The Negativity Instinct

We tend to think the world is getting worse because we only see terrible things in media. Media is incentivized (through clicks and viewership) to show us sensational things, so don’t trust it as an accurate source of information. Look at data, or at “boring”, long-form news sources like CSPAN.

The world is getting much better, but that doesn’t mean we have to stop working to solve problems. Rosling recommends thinking of the world as “bad and better”. Lots of graphs in this chapter that show how much better things are getting – very uplifting.

When you hear about something terrible, calm yourself by asking, If there had been an equally large positive improvement, would I have heard about that? Even if there had been hundreds of larger improvements, would I have heard? Would I ever hear about children who don’t drown? Can I see a decrease in child drownings, or in deaths from tuberculosis, out my window, or on the news, or in a charity’s publicity material? Keep in mind that the positive changes may be more common, but they don’t find you. You need to find them. (And if you look in the statistics, they are everywhere.)

Other tips:
–More news does not equal more suffering.
–Beware of rosy pasts. It’s easy to feel nostalgia, both about your own life and your country. In doing so, we forget about the bad things we had to deal with in the past (e.g. the people who glorify 1950’s America without thinking about how scary polio was during that time).

The Straight Line Instinct

We tend to extrapolate statistics linearly, but many phenomena that matter at a global scale (rates of infection spreading, growth in population, etc.) move exponentially or logistically (or are hard to model). Example: many people are worried about an explosion of population but don’t realize that the rate of population growth is decreasing. The Earth will likely never have more than 12 billion people.

The Fear Instinct

When something is scary, we spend a disproportionate amount of time worrying about it. Example: most people spend more time worrying about dying in a terrorist attack than they do dying of heart disease or a car crash, despite the latter two causing far more deaths.

Other tips:
–Risk = danger x exposure. When you’re afraid of something, ask yourself: how dangerous is this, and how likely am I to be exposed to it?
–Get calm before you carry on. Making emotional decisions rarely helps anyone.

The Size Instinct

Rosling was a doctor in Mozambique and had hundreds of children dying in front of him every year. This was tragic, but he couldn’t focus all his time on these children because there were so many more children that died before they could reach the hospital. He started working with village health workers to prevent common causes of child death.

If he had only been working with the children in the hospital because their suffering was salient, he would’ve prevented far fewer deaths. We’re terrible at judging the size of something, and we jump to conclusions based on a single instance or identifiable victim.

Other tips:
-Never take a number by itself. Ask for something to compare it against.
-Divide large numbers. When we divide an amount (say, the number of children in Hong Kong) by another amount (say, the number of schools in Hong Kong), we get a rate (children per school in Hong Kong).
-Use the 80/20 rule. Many distributions follow a power law, so look for the few items that cause disproportionate impact.

The Generalization Instinct

We make generalizations all the time. This helps us understand the world quickly and easily, but it can distort our worldview (the West vs. the rest is a good example of this).

Other tips:
–Find better categories: This is what we did with the gap instinct and dollar street. I like this one, because it takes advantage of our predisposition towards generalization.
–Question your categories: There are multiple ways you need to do this.

• Look for differences within groups. Africa is a huge continent, but many people often categorize all African people as the same.
• Look for similarities across groups. People in Level 2 of wealth live pretty similarly, regardless of what country they’re in.
• Look for differences across groups. Putting wounded soldiers on their stomachs helps them from choking on their own vomit, but putting babies on their stomachs leads to increased infant mortality.
• Beware of “the majority”. This could mean anywhere from 51% to 99%, so don’t assume you have an accurate picture of the situation when you hear “majority”.
• Beware of vivid examples. The fear instinct at play again. We’re afraid of dying in a terrorist attack despite the probability of our doing so being extremely low.
• Assume people are not idiots. This is especially important with cultures you don’t understand. There are many good ways of doing things that would never occur to us.

The Destiny Instinct

It’s easy to think that certain countries won’t reach level 4 (the wealthiest level for a nation, like that of the U.S. or western Europe) because of their culture. The fact is all countries worldwide have been seeing progress over the past 50-100 years in many key metrics, and they will continue to do so. Change takes time.

Example: people assume that religious families tend to have more kids, but a country’s wealth is a far stronger predictor of average family size. Values change. If you still don’t believe me, talk to your grandparents – they likely hold very different values from you!

The Single Perspective Instinct

We often use “thing” to describe the world (be that a mental model, the opinion of a person we trust, data, conspiracy theories, etc.). We expose ourselves to glaring errors if we do this (Phil Tetlock talks about this in Superforecasting). Keep your ego small (avoid crony beliefs), and look at multiple perspectives.

Example: Some people think the free market is the solution to all problems. This theory is comforting because it’s simple and explains nearly everything, but you increase your risk of looking foolish if you subscribe to it unquestioningly.

Useful heuristic: if experts agree on something, there’s a good chance you should trust them. If they disagree though, it’s probably too complex to trust any individual’s opinion.

The Blame Instinct

We often want someone to blame when something goes wrong. People typically act in self-interest, so look at the incentive structure to understand why people do what they do.

The problem is that when we identify the bad guy, we are done thinking. And it’s almost always more complicated than that. It’s almost always about multiple interacting causes—a system. If you really want to change the world, you have to understand how it actually works and forget about punching anyone in the face.

The first story in this chapter, Let’s Beat Up Grandma, is illuminating. My favorite in the book (and there are many great ones).

The Urgency Instinct

When we are afraid and under time pressure and thinking of worst-case scenarios, we tend to make really stupid decisions. Our ability to think analytically can be overwhelmed by an urge to make quick decisions and take immediate action.

Our tendency to motivate people to action is to use fear (e.g. “You need to act now before it’s too late!”). This approach might be effective in the short term, but it destroys trust in the long term. Use data and rationality to make your points. If the situation truly is urgent, the data should verify that.

I do not deny that there are pressing global risks we need to address. I am not an optimist painting the world in pink. I don’t get calm by looking away from problems. The five that concern me most are the risks of global pandemic, financial collapse, world war, climate change, and extreme poverty.

Factfulness in Practice

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.

When we have a fact-based worldview, we can see that the world is not as bad as it seems—and we can see what we have to do to keep making it better.