Rosling - Factfulness

How can I more accurately interpret both mainstream and social media reports that are often biased or outright misrepresentations of truth? I picked up Hans Rosling's Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World - and Why Things are Better Than You Think (2018) with the hope that it might offer perspective that I could use and share with others. While Rosling's assertions are not revelatory, they were useful and offer an opportunity to be more critical interpreting what we read and hear.

When searching for understanding about issues of concern to me, I know to be cautious about social media, checking the origin of information I read and seeking alternative sources to confirm reports that are shared or receive numerous "likes." However, I frequently complain about journalists who do not present fair and unbiased views. Rosling places the responsibility clearly on us, recognizing that journalists or activists for any cause should automatically be assumed to advocate a particular view. If bias is assumed from almost every source, then the only place to turn is critical examination that will improve my ability to sort through hyperbole and disinformation that distracts from real concerns.

Based on deep analyses of a variety of topics, and quizzing/speaking to audiences in various workforce sectors across the world (including the World Economic Forum, World Health Organization, UNICEF, and others), Rosling found that the most common misconceptions about current conditions in the world result from hasty decisions made without critical examination. And these decisions involve ten significant errors of interpretation:

• Gap - dividing everything into distinct and conflicting groups, when most people and situations fall somewhere in the middle of a continuum
• Negativity - tending to notice bad more than good, exacerbated by glorifying the past, selective reporting of the present, and feeling it's cruel to view things as improving
• Straight line - assuming a unidirectional and inevitable path with just one outcome 
• Fear -  attending to the most dramatic and unlikely dangers while ignoring other things that could be riskier
• Size - focusing on immediate problems rather than larger dynamics that could cause more harm
• Generalization - mistakenly grouping people and things together that are fundamentally different
• Destiny - believing that people, countries, religions, or cultures have a predetermined fate
• Singularity - measuring human progress by one, or a few, indicators rather than the complicated intersection of many factors
• Blame - fixing responsibility on a clear or simple reason, exaggerating its importance and neglecting other explanations
• Urgency - jumping to action when danger appears imminent, while it rarely is as immediate or devastating as we envision

Rosling provided lots of examples and proof of how our lives are captured by the interpretation errors above, and he provided tips for how to avoid the mistakes and come to a more factful understanding of the world. Each of the above is influenced by the reality of a world that is divided into roughly four broad divisions of  prosperity, with the U.S.A. and Europe mostly at level 4, the majority of the world in the middle (2 and 3), and a few countries at level 1 - all growing toward level 4. The other influence is that the world has both bad and good things going on; under these circumstances, a "possibilist" perspective rather than either a defeatest or naively optimistic view is warranted.

The achievement that Rosling claimed at the beginning of his book was the most revolutionary of his lifetime is that "Over the past twenty years, the proportion of the global population living in extreme poverty has halved" (p. 6). Indeed, this is such a foundational change that it impacts almost everything else in our world. However, some of the disasters referenced as possible threats in Factfulness are now part of our more disrupted world. First, the COVID 19 pandemic that shut down the world and second, two wars now raging in 2023. On top of these, anti-democratic forces are present in the U.S.A. and around the world that threaten the very foundations of modern life. Acknowledging positive changes in our world, as well as understanding potential threats, requires even greater discipline as we seek factfulness in our daily lives.