Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling Read Free Book Online

groups, with a gap in between. The reality is often not polarized at all. Usually the majority is right there in the middle, where the gap is supposed to be.
    To control the gap instinct, look for the majority.
    • Beware comparisons of averages. If you could check the spreads you would probably find they overlap. There is probably no gap at all.
    • Beware comparisons of extremes. In all groups, of countries or people, there are some at the top and some at the bottom. The difference is sometimes extremely unfair. But even then the majority is usually somewhere in between, right where the gap is supposed to be.
    • The view from up here. Remember, looking down from above distorts the view. Everything else looks equally short, but it’s not.

CHAPTER TWO
THE NEGATIVITY INSTINCT

How I was kind of born in Egypt, and what a baby in an incubator can teach us about the world
     
    Which statement do you agree with most?
    A: The world is getting better.
    B: The world is getting worse.
    C: The world is getting neither better nor worse.
Getting Out of the Ditch
    I remember being suddenly upside down. I remember the dark, the smell of urine, and being unable to breathe as my mouth and nostrils filled with mud. I remember struggling to turn myself upright but only sinking deeper into the sticky liquid. I remember my arms, stretched out behind me, desperately searching the grass for something to pull, then being suddenly hauled out by the ankles. My grandma putting me in the big sink on the kitchen floor and washing me gently, with the hot water meant for the dishes. The scent of the soap.
    These are my earliest memories and were nearly my last. They are memories of my rescue, aged four, from the sewage ditch running in front of my grandma’s house. It was filled to the brim with a mix of last night’s rain and sewage slurry from the factory workers’ township. Something in it had caught my attention, and stepping to the ditch’s edge, I had slipped and fallen in headfirst. My parents were not around to keep an eye on me. My mother was in the hospital, ill with tuberculosis. My father worked ten hours a day.
    During the week, I lived with my grandparents. On Saturdays my daddy put me on the rack of his bike and we drove in large circles and figures of eight just for fun on our way to the hospital. I would see Mommy standing on the balcony on the third floor coughing. Daddy would explain that if we went in we could get sick too. I would wave to her and she would wave back. I saw her talking to me, but her voice was too weak and her words were carried away by the wind. I remember that she always tried to smile.
The Mega Misconception That “The World Is Getting Worse”
    This chapter is about the negativity instinct: our tendency to notice the bad more than the good. This instinct is behind the second mega misconception.
    “Things are getting worse” is the statement about the world that I hear more than any other. And it is absolutely true that there are many bad things in this world.
    The number of war fatalities has been falling since the Second World War, but with the Syrian war, the trend has reversed. Terrorism too is rising again. (We’ll get back to that in chapter 4.)
    Overfishing and the deterioration of the seas are truly worrisome. The lists of dead areas in the world’s oceans and of endangered species are getting longer.
    Ice is melting. Sea levels will continue to rise by probably three feet over the next 100 years. There’s no doubt it’s because of all the greenhouse gases humans have pumped into the atmosphere, which won’t disperse for a long time, even if we stop adding more.
    The collapse of the US housing market in 2007, which no regulators had predicted, was caused by widespread illusions of safety in abstract investments, which hardly anyone understood. The system remains as complex now as it was then and a similar crisis could happen again. Maybe tomorrow.
    In order for this planet to have