Is the world going to hell in a handbasket? Noriel Roubini, the NYU economist who famously predicted the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, now believes we are sleepwalking on a mountain of interconnected megathreats, including “the mother of all debt crises” and other financial, trade, geopolitical, technological, and environmental catastrophes.1 Similarly, the World Economic Forum warns that “the health and economic aftereffects of the pandemic have quickly spiraled into compounding crises,” while the Financial Times recently coined “polycrisis” as its buzzword of the year.2,3 On the other hand, the latest World Happiness Report suggests “life evaluations have continued to be remarkably resilient, with global averages in the COVID-19 years 2020-22 just as high as those in the pre-pandemic years 2017-19.”4
How should we interpret these seemingly conflicting worldviews?
The late Swedish physician and self-described edutainer,5 Hans Rosling, spent a lifetime studying what he called Factfulness – i.e., reserving judgment until we have clear, strong, and supporting facts. Rosling’s homonymous best-seller continues to be widely praised by C-Suite executives around the world, including Bill Gates, who calls it “one of the most educational books I’ve ever read.”6
In Factfulness, Rosling explains how thousands of people have taken his 13-question survey about the state of the world, with sobering results. On average, respondents answer only two of the first 12 questions correctly, with 15% receiving a score of zero. Only 7% know that the percentage of the global population living in extreme poverty has halved in the past 20 years, and only 13% are aware that almost all people now have some access to modern health care. A mere 10% of respondents manage to outperform random guesswork. Surprisingly, education doesn’t seem to matter, as Rosling claims some of the worst results came from a group of Nobel laureates and medical researchers.
Rosling’s findings suggest not only that most of us get our facts wrong, but that we get them systemically wrong. People, he believes, almost always err on the side of pessimism. Why? Rosling believes our brains are hard-wired with instincts that may have been useful on the African savannah thousands of years ago but are now potentially harmful. Specifically, Rosling identifies ten such instincts that purportedly explain why we tend to adopt overly negative views:
The Gap Instinct – dividing everything into two often conflicting groups, with an imagined gap in between (e.g., democracies vs. autocracies).
The Negativity Instinct – noticing the bad more than the good due to skewed media coverage (i.e., bad news sells), romanticizing the past (“those were the days”), and other factors.
The Straight-Line Instinct – assuming recent trends will simply continue unchanged.
The Fear Instinct – paying close attention to things that could harm us, focusing on the dramatic while filtering out the prosaic.
The Size Instinct – misjudging relative proportions and focusing on single numbers instead of underlying trends.
The Generalization Instinct – intuitively grouping things, people, or countries that are actually very different.
The Destiny Instinct – believing that things have always been as they are and will never change.
The Single Perspective Instinct – basing our opinions and beliefs on single causes and information sources, due to ideological preferences and an (over)reliance on specialists.
The Blame Instinct – looking for clear and simple reasons (e.g., greedy businessmen, crooked politicians, lying journalists) instead of seeking more thoughtful explanations.
The Urgency Instinct – feeling the need to take immediate action and “do something” - anything - to counter a perceived threat.
How can we become more adept at Factfulness? Predictably, Rosling feels that data and analysis are the cure. In practice, this means following a few simple principles, such as never relying on single numbers and averages, assuming that non-linear relationships are the norm, and quantifying risks wherever possible. It means identifying meaningful differences within and across groups, meticulously tracking even gradual changes to major decision variables, and always looking for root causes and underlying systems instead of villains and heroes. It means recognizing that most news reports are inherently negative and deferring major decisions – or at least breaking them into smaller ones – until the future is sufficiently clear again. And it means always remaining humble about our own expertise.7
These are all sensible recommendations and having a fact-based worldview clearly matters – a lot. It certainly matters to C-Suite executives, who must steer their organizations through times of unprecedented uncertainty, complexity, and risk. It also matters to policymakers addressing global challenges, such as climate change, that require international collaboration and a shared understanding of the facts. And it matters to every one of us, as we try to decide what to worry about, what to ignore, and how to vote.
Rosling is surely correct in pointing out our innate focus on drama and the media’s related preference for negative headlines. Yet Rosling’s own analysis isn’t free from bias. The 13 survey questions focus on positive global trends and require detailed quantitative knowledge. Respondents might do better when there are no trends or the issue is more salient to them. Would respondents have a positive bias if something was getting worse, such as systemic increases in income inequality, loss of biodiversity, and global climate change?
Rosling also never considers other, equally important, instincts, such as our tendency to ignore the data when it is unclear how, or merely inconvenient, to respond. Many unforeseen disasters, including the recent pandemic, were predicted years in advance, but somehow neglected.8 Conversely, we tend to be instinctively overconfident in things we believe we can control – e.g., annual targets and objectives.
And time itself may have caught up with Rosling. It is certainly true that mankind has made tremendous progress on numerous human development criteria, including access to electricity, literacy rates, hunger, and child mortality at birth. At the same time, we still face formidable, even existential, challenges. For example, the latest UN report on global climate change concludes with very high confidence that “the window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all is rapidly closing.”9 And the worldwide financial turmoil caused by the recent collapse of SVB, a relatively small regional U.S. bank, supports Roubini’s contention that the global financial system remains extremely fragile even today.10
Nevertheless, Rosling’s main argument remains valuable: our brains are hard-wired to systematically misinterpret the world around us and developing a fact-based worldview is the antidote. Or, as Sergeant Joe Friday put it far more succinctly many years ago: “All we want are the facts, ma’am.”