'Factfulness' book review: The world is not really as bad as you think

'Factfulness' offers a booster inoculation against the prevailing irrational pessimism

My grandmother was the Lesothian member of our family,” is one of the most beguiling sentences in Factfulness. Surely Hans Rosling, a Swedish doctor and researcher, did not mean that literally? And indeed he did not have an ancestor from that poor southern African country. What Rosling is drawing our attention to with this thoughtful click-bait is that when his grandmother was born in Sweden in 1891, “Sweden was like Lesotho is today. That’s the country with the shortest life expectancy in the world.” His grandmother hand-washed the laundry for her family of nine. “By the end of her life she had an indoor cold-water tap and a (basic bucket toilet) in the basement, luxury compared to her childhood when there had been no running water.” His grandparents could spell and count but “could not read a children’s book to me, nor could they write a letter. Sweden in my grandparents’ generation had the same level of literacy that India has achieved today.”

Reading Factfulness is like taking a booster inoculation against the prevailing irrational pessimism. We are surrounded by people, citing the headlines of the day, who say the world is going to hell. I have taken a vow of abstinence from arguing with non-resident Indian bankers who claim that India made no progress between 1947 and 2014, all empirical and anecdotal evidence to the contrary. I can only guess how they came to think this way, but they are not alone in their deliberate ignorance. Similar sorts of views not based on data about the ills of immigration, crime rising in Britain and the huge transfer of wealth that would accrue to the National Health Service led people to vote for Brexit in Britain. Rosling and, even more forcefully, Steven Pinker in his recent book, Enlightenment Now, identify a common culprit: the media. “We never see a journalist saying to the camera, “I’m reporting live from a country where a war has not broken out,” writes Pinker. “The positive and negative (news) unfolds on different time lines… Bad things can happen quickly, but good things aren’t built in a day, and they will be out of sync with the news cycle.”

Factfulness: Ten Reasons we’re wrong about the world — and why things are better than you think; Author: Hans Rosling with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Ronnlund; Publisher: Hachette India; Pages: 342; Price: Rs 499

This is true when applied to tabloids and 24-hour news cycles, but in an era of popular political demagogues who are economical with the facts and their devotees’ diligent WhatsApp forwarding of untruths, there are other contributing factors as well. And yet, it’s hard to argue with the facts. The book begins with a quiz about the well-being of the world’s inhabitants the authors (Factfulness is co-authored with Rosling’s son and daughter-in-law) devised for 12,000 people in 14 countries. To give but one example, “In the last 20 years the proportion of the world living in extreme poverty has…” The average respondent got only two of the 13 answers correct, choosing the more pessimistic options. I am hopeless at quizzes but somehow got nine of the answers, a fluke I attribute to: (a) not having owned a TV for several years because I am a coward prone to nightmares if I watch Arnab Goswami and his ilk before going to bed; (b) primarily reading (and working for) the business and economic press, which gives one a better sense of the arc of human progress than, say, the tawdry tales of the Times of India. 

The book begins with a quiz about the well-being of the world’s inhabitants the authors devised for 12,000 people in 14 countries. The average respondent got only two of the 13 answers correct, choosing the more pessimistic options

Still, it is a surprise to discover in Factfulness that pretty much every child in the world gets some inoculation or the other. It is not a revelation to learn that infant mortality has dropped dramatically over the past several decades but the data is dramatic, nonetheless. In 1950, 14.4 million babies around the world died before they turned one; by 2016, 4.2 million did. Partly as a result, birth rates almost everywhere are plateauing or declining: “UN experts expect that in the year 2100 there will be 2 billion children, the same number as today.” 

Rosling does not tackle questions such as what work these children will grow up to do in an era of drastically narrowing employment opportunities in both the developed and developing world nor whether there will be enough water for them to drink in a water-scarce planet. He accepts that climate change is happening and is one of five global risks we should worry about, but opts not to look ahead to its frightening consequences, especially in large countries as unscientifically governed as India. 

Still, this is a delightful book because its mix of fact and anecdote is uplifting. This is a testament to its author who fell into a sewer head at the age of four, but was saved by his grandmother. Grandmothers also played a role in creating the alternate universe of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and R K Narayan; Rosling’s grandparents gave him another worldview. When Ebola broke out, Rosling, who co-founded Médecins Sans Frontières in Sweden, rushes to Liberia. Diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2016 and given a couple of months to live, he pushes ahead with Factfulness and is revising chapters when he dies a year later. Falling into a sewer as a toddler is not to be recommended, but it is easy to see why the world’s possibilities might seem infinite afterwards.