Factfulness is a political choice

The strangely factless argument to keep the world as it is

Hassan Damluji, November 2022

I’ve always taken a more positive view on the world than the doom and gloom of so much reporting. So when Hans, Ola and Anna Rosling’s Factfulness came out in 2018, I was squarely within the target audience. Building on their life’s work highlighting the unsung progress that humanity has made over the last century, this family trio packed a truckload of good news that most people don’t know about into a bright orange book that positively beams at you from the shelf. 

I wasn’t the only one who was moved to pick it up. Factfulness is one of the most popular books of the century. It sold over a million copies in its first year, and has now passed that milestone in Japan alone. It was lavished with praise by Barrack Obama and gifted by Bill Gates to every graduating college student in America who wanted a free copy.  

Let me tell you why I think the book is extremely dangerous. 

Hans Rosling, who sadly died before the book was published, along with his son Ola and daughter-in-law Anna, became famous by proving to often very smart people that they were stupider than monkeys. Many years ago, I was an audience member in one of their amazing lectures, where they showed that I, and all the other university-educated people around me, performed worse than a primate bashing a keyboard at answering multiple choice questions about the state of the world. But there was a happy ending to this uncomfortable experience. We may have been ignorant, but good news: the world is much better than we realised. More children are being vaccinated and schooled, fewer are dying, more are living on into old age than we had guessed. This was especially true of countries and regions that we thought of as hopelessly poor but in fact had seen plenty of hope, and improvement in recent years. 

This was rousing stuff. So when the landmark book came out, I rushed to get my copy. Here was where the Roslings would go beyond the observation that we so often get it wrong, to explain why, and what can be done about it.  

That is where it all gets very troubling. 

I am fascinated by the psychology of international relations. What does the public think about their obligations to fellow humans across the world? To what extent can shifts in that perception move the goal posts of what is practically achievable? Is public anger against globalization an opportunity for progress, or a crisis? These are difficult questions, and ones that could do with much more of a fact base. Here came the masters of factfulness to wade into the debate, and I was all ears. 

The problem, they tell us, with our perception of the world, is that it is afflicted by ten biases, which they call “instincts”. Specifically, these are “overdramatic instincts” which create the “overdramatic worldview” that leads us astray. These instincts include, for example, the “gap instinct”, that makes us believe people fit into distinct and very different levels of wealth rather than the reality of a smooth bell-curve. Then there’s the “size instinct”, which makes us shocked at, for example, millions of children dying every year, ignoring that this represents an improvement on years gone by. If only we could curb these instincts (the book offers tips like “when you see bad news, ask whether equally positive news would have reached you”), we would see the world for what it is, and… well, relax. Because the factful worldview is “a new kind of happy pill, completely free online!” 

Now “instinct” is a biological term. Based on my (imperfect) understanding of behavioural economics, I would have expected these tendencies to be described as biases, not instincts. But OK, what difference does that make? Either way we’re talking about universal human psychological characteristics that have plausible evolutionary explanations. The Roslings are clear that these instincts are genetic, telling us that, like the desire to gorge on sugar, we have evolved to be overdramatic because it was good for us in the deep evolutionary past, but no longer. Now we must be factful, which means casting aside these ten tendencies. 

As I’m sure you’re aware, behavioural economics is no longer a nascent field of academic research, and there are thousands of articles and books published every year setting out the evidence behind the biases that humans have in making their judgments about the world. So let me sum up the scientific evidence base that the Roslings, champions of fact-based analysis, marshal in defence of their theory of “ten dramatic instincts”. 

. 

That was it. Precisely nothing. Not a single footnote, not a single quote, not one reference to a published work of any kind (let alone an academic one). They simply shrugged and made it up. They made it up based on their experience of the world, just like we in their audiences have forever been making up a set of opinions which they have for decades been revealing as distorted.  

How could this possibly be? How could the fact-guys build a psychological theory and not even pretend to have data behind it? Moreover, why would they do that? 

The dangerous part, of course, is not in the list of ten entirely made up “instincts”. It would be nice to know if they were indeed the mechanisms for human fallibility. It’s the next part of the argument, the one that says: these instincts may have been advantageous in the past, but now they’re not. So chill. Chill about what precisely? The Roslings make very clear that one of the things we should chill about is extreme wealth inequality. They also want us to calm down about the environment. Yes, they admit, there are many concerning problems out there, but “the current lack of knowledge about the world is the most concerning problem of all”. Really? The fact that people aren’t aware that African life expectancy is now around 70 is a bigger problem than climate change? 

If the world has been improving relentlessly for hundreds of years, as the Roslings are at pains to tell us, is there a chance that it is precisely because of humans’ nagging focus, which magnifies our challenges and chalks up the wins unglamorously? I am the first person to agree that factual accuracy has a value all of its own. But there is a difference between saying that, and claiming that our pessimism is the biggest single danger out there. To convince me of that, you need some evidence. The Roslings have none. 

Because in truth, the factfulness narrative is not a plea for accuracy, it is a plea for stability. It’s an unevidenced political statement masquerading as science. And the statement is: chill. Accept the status quo. Do not vote for radical solutions. The system is working.  

No wonder so many established leaders around the world have promoted the message of factfulness. Religion was once the opium of the people. In our secular age, I’d think twice before swallowing the Roslings’ “new kind of happy pill”.