Top Quotes: “Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World — and Why Things are Better than You Think” — Hans Rosling

Introduction

“Over the past 20 years, the proportion of the global population living in extreme poverty has halved. This is absolutely revolutionary. I consider it to be the most important change that has happened in the world in my lifetime. It’s also a pretty basic fact to know about life on Earth. But people do not know it. On average only 7% get this question right.”

“Almost all children are vaccinated in the world today. This is amazing. It means that almost all human beings alive today have some access to basic modern healthcare. But most people don’t know this. On average just 13% of people get the answer right.”

“The vast majority of the world’s population lives somewhere in the middle of the income scale. Perhaps they’re not what we think of as middle class, but they’re not living in extreme poverty. Their girls go to school, their children get vaccinated, they live in two-child families, and they want to go abroad on holiday, not as refugees. Step-by-step, year-by-year, the world is improving. Not on every single measure every single year, but as a rule. Through the world faces huge challenges, we’ve made tremendous progress. This is the fact-based worldview.”

“The human brain is a product of millions of years of evolution, and we’re hard-wired with instincts that helped our ancestors to survive in small groups of hunters and gatherers. Our brains often jump to swift conclusions without much thinking, which used to help us to avoid immediate dangers. We’re interested in gossip and dramatic stories, which used to be the only source of news and useful info. We crave sugar and fat, which used to be life-saving sources of energy when food was scarce. We have many instincts that used to be useful thousands of years ago, but we live in a very different world now. Our quick-thinking brains and cravings for drama are causing misconceptions and an overdramatic worldview.

Don’t misunderstand me. We still need these dramatic instincts to give meaning to our world and get us through the day. If we sifted every input and analyzed every decision rationally, a normal life would be impossible. We shouldn’t cut out all sugar and fat, and we shouldn’t ask a surgeon to remove the parts of our brain that deal with emotions. But we need to learn to control our drama intake. Uncontrolled, our appetite for the dramatic goes too far, prevents us from seeing the world as it is, and leads us terribly astray.”

“Saudi Arabian society has made amazing progress. Child deaths per thousand dropped from 242 to 35 in just 33 years. That’s way faster than Sweden. We took 77 years to achieve the same improvement. And Malaysia? 14 today. In 1960, it was 93.”

“The world has completely changed. Today, families are small and child deaths are rare in the vast majority of countries, including China and India. The small box, with few children and high survival, that’s where all countries are heading. And most countries are already there. 85% of mankind are already inside the box that used to be named ‘developed world.’ The remaining 15% are mostly in between the two boxes. Only 13 countries, representing 6% of the world population are still inside the ‘developing’ box.”

“Most of us are stuck with a completely outdated idea about the rest of the world.

The complete world makeover is not unique to family size and child survival rates. The change looks very similar for pretty much any aspect of human lives. Graphs showing levels of income, or tourism, or democracy, or access to education, healthcare, or electricity would all tell the same story: that the world used to be divided into two but isn’t any longer. Today, most people are in the middle. There’s no gap between the West and the rest, between developed and developing, between rich bad poor. And we should all stop using the simple pairs of categories that suggest there is.”

“‘Poor developing countries’ no longer exist as a distinct group. Today, most people, 75%, live in middle-income countries. Not poor, not rich, but somewhere in the middle and starting to live a reasonable life. At one end of the scale there are still countries with a majority living in extreme and unacceptable poverty; at the other is the wealthy world. But the vast majority are already in the middle.

‘And what do you base that knowledge on?’ continued the journalist. I couldn’t help getting irritated: ‘I use normal stats that are compiled by the World Bank and the UN. This isn’t controversial. These facts aren’t up for discussion. I’m right and you’re wrong.’”

“There are only a few countries in the world — exceptional places like Afghanistan or South Sudan — where fewer than 20% of girls finish primary school, and at most 2% of the world’s girls live in such countries.”

“We asked people in Sweden and the U.S.: Of the world population, what percentage lives in low-income countries?

The majority suggested the answer was 50%+. The average guess was 59%.

The real figure is 9%. Only 9% of the world lives in low-income countries. And remember, we just worked out that those countries are not nearly as terrible as people think. They’re really bad in many ways, but they’re not at or below the level of Afghanistan, Somalia, or Central African Republic, the worst places to live on the planet.

To summarize: low-income countries are much more developed than most people think. And vastly fewer people live in them. The idea of a divided world with a majority stuck in misery and deprivation is an illusion.”

“Level 1: You start on Level 1 with $1/day. Your five children have to spend hours walking barefoot with your single plastic bucket, back and forth, to fetch water from a dirty mud hole an hour’s walk away. On their way home they gather firewood, and you prepare the same gray porridge that you’ve been eating at every meal, every day, for your whole life — except during the months when the meager soil yielded no crops and you went to bed hungry. One day your youngest daughter develops a nasty cough. Smoke from the indoor fire is weakening her lungs. You can’t afford antibiotics, and one month later she’s dead. This is extreme poverty. Yet you keep struggling on. If you’re lucky and the yields are good, you can maybe sell some surplus crops and manage to earn more than $2/day, which would move you to the next level. (Roughly 1 billion people live like this today.)

Level 2: You’ve made it. In fact, you’ve quadrupled your income and now you earn $4/day. What are you going to do with all this money? Now you can buy food that you didn’t grow yourself, and you can afford chickens, which means eggs. You save some money and buy sandals for your children, and a bike, and more plastic buckets. Now it takes you only half an hour to fetch water for the day. You buy a gas stove so your children can attend school instead of gathering wood. When there’s power they do their homework under a bulb. But the electricity is too unstable for a freezer. You save up for mattresses so you don’t have to sleep on the mud floor. Life is much better now, but still very uncertain. A single illness and you’d have to sell most of your possessions to buy medicine. That would throw you back to Level 1 again. Another $3/day would be good, but to experience really drastic improvement you need to quadruple again. If you can land a job in the local garment industry you’ll be the first member of your family to bring home a salary. (Roughly 3 billion people live like this today.)

Level 3: You did it! You work multiple jobs, 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, and manage to quadruple your income again, to $16/day. Your savings are impressive and you install a cold-water tap. No more fetching water. With a stable electric line the kids’ homework improves and you can buy a fridge that lets you store food and serve different dishes each day. You save to buy a motorcycle, which means you can travel to a better-paying job at a factory in town. Unfortunately you crash on your way there one day and you have to use money you’d saved for your children’s education to pay the medical bills. You recover, and thanks to your savings you’re not thrown back a level. Two of your children start high school. If they manage to finish, they’ll be able to get better-paying jobs than you have ever had. To celebrate, you take the whole family on its first-ever vacation, one afternoon to the beach, just for fun. (Roughly 2 billion people live like this today.)

Level 4: You have more than $64/day. You’re a rich consumer and three more dollars a day makes very little difference to your everyday life. That’s why you think $3, which can change the life of someone living in extreme poverty, isn’t a lot of money. You have more than 12 years of education and you’ve been on a plane on vacation. You an eat out once a month and you can buy a car. Of course you have hot and cold water indoors. (Roughly 1 billion people live like this today.)

Often it takes several generations for a family to move from Level 1 to Level 4, but it is possible to move through the levels, both for individuals and countries.

Human history started with everyone on Level 1. For more than 100,000 years, nobody made it up the levels and most children didn’t survive to become parents. Just 200 years ago, 85% of the world population was still on Level 1, in extreme poverty.”

“Today the vast majority of people are spread out in the middle, across Levels 2 and 3, with the same range of standards of living as people had in Western Europe and North America in the 1950s. And this has been the case for many years.”

“Factfulness is recognizing when a story talks about a gap, and remembering that this paints a picture of two separate 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’d probably find they overlap. There’s probably no gap at all.
• Beware comparisons of extremes. In all groups, of countries or people, there’s 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.”

News is Bad and Dramatic

“In the year 1800, roughly 85% of humanity lived on Level 1, in extreme poverty. All over the world, people simply didn’t have enough food. Most people went to bed hungry several times a year. Across Britain and its colonies, children had to work to eat, and the average child in the UK started work at age ten. 1/5 of the entire Swedish population fled starvation to the U.S., and only 20% of them ever returned.”

“In the last 20 years, extreme poverty dropped faster than ever in world history.

In 1997, 42% of the population of both India and China were living in extreme poverty. By 2017, in India, that share had dropped to 12%: there were 270 million fewer people living in extreme poverty than there had been just 20 years earlier. In China, that share dropped to a stunning 0.7% over the same period, meaning another half a billion people over this crucial threshold. Meanwhile, Latin America took its proportion from 14% to 4%: another 35 million people. While all estimates of extreme poverty are very uncertain, when the change appears to be like this, then beyond all doubt something huge is happening.”

“Showing all the causes of deaths and suffering in one number is nearly impossible. But average life expectancy gets very close. Every child death, every premature death from man-made or natural disasters, every mom dying in childbirth, and every elderly person’s prolonged life is reflected in this measure.

Back in 1800, when Swedes starved to death and British children worked in coal mines, life expectancy was roughly 30 years everywhere in the world. That was what it had been throughout history. Among all babies who were ever born, roughly half died during their childhood. Most of the other half died between ages 50 and 70. So the average was around 30. It doesn’t mean most people lived to be 30 .It’s just an average, and with averages we must always remember that there’s a spread.

The average life expectancy around the world today is 72.”

“When I show this amazing graph, people often ask, ‘What is the most recent dip there?’ and they point at 1960. This is a great opportunity for me to attack the misconception that the world is getting worse.

There’s a dip in the global life expectancy curve in 1960 because 15 to 40 million people — nobody knows the exact number — starved to death that year in China, in what was probably the world’s largest ever man-made famine.

The 1960 Chinese harvest was smaller than planned because of a bad season combined with poor governmental advice about how to grow crops more effectively. The local governments didn’t want to show bad results, so they took all the food and sent it to the central government. There was no food left. One year later the shocked inspectors were delivering eyewitness reports of cannibalism and dead bodies along roads. The government denied that its central planning had failed, and the catastrophe was kept secret by the Chinese government for 36 years. It wasn’t described in English to the outside world until 1996. (Think about it. Could any government keep the death of 15 million people a global secret today?)

Even if the Chinese government had told the world about this tragedy, the UN World Food Program — which today distributes food to wherever it’s most needed in the world — couldn’t have helped. It wasn’t created until 1961.”

“My grandmother was the Lesothian member of our family. When she was born in 1891, Sweden was like Lesotho is today. That’s the country with the shortest life expectancy in the world today, right on the border between Level 1 and 2, almost in extreme poverty. My grandmother hand-washed all the laundry for her family of 9 all her adult life. But as she grew older, she witnessed the miracle of development as both she and Sweden reached Level 3. By the end of her life she had an indoor cold-water tap and a latrine bucket in the basement: luxury compared to her childhood, when there’d been no running water. All four of my grandparents could spell and count, but none of them was literate enough to read for pleasure. They couldn’t read children’s books to me, nor could they write a letter. None of them had had more than four years of school. Sweden in my grandparents’ generation had the level of literacy that India, also on Level 2, has achieved today.

My great-grandmother was born in 1863, when Sweden’s average income level was like today’s Afghanistan, right on Level 1, with a majority of the population living in extreme poverty. Great-grandmother didn’t forget to tell her daughter, my grandmother, how cold the mud floor used to be in the winter. But today people in Afghanistan and other countries on Level 1 live much longer lives than Swedes did back in 1863. This is because basic modernizations have reached most people and improved their lives drastically. They have plastic bags to store and transport food. They have plastic buckets to carry water and soap to kill germs. Most of their children are vaccinated. On average they live 30 years longer than Swedes did in 1800, when Sweden was on Level 1. That’s how much life even on Level 1 has improved.”

“In large part, it’s because of our negativity instinct: our instinct to notice the bad more than the good. There are three things going on here: the misremembering of the past; selective reporting by journalists and activists; and the feeling that as long as things are bad it’s heartless to say they’re getting better.”

“For centuries, older people have romanticized their youths and insisted that things ain’t what they used to be. Well, that’s true, but not in the way that they mean it. Most things used to be worse, not better. But it’s extremely easy for humans to forgot how things really did ‘used to be.’”

“The media and activists rely on drama to grab your attention. Remember that negative stories are more dramatic than neutral or positive ones. Remember how simple it is to construct a story of crisis from a temporary dip pulled out of its context of a long-term improvement. Remember that we live in a connected and transparent world where reporting about suffering is better than it’s ever been before.

When you hear about something terrible, calm yourself by asking, If there had been an equally large positive improvement, would I have heard about it? Even if there’d been hundreds of larger improvements, would I have heard? Would I ever hear about children who don’t drown? Can I see a decrease in child drownings, or in deaths from tuberculosis, out my window, or on the news, or in a charity’s publicity material? Keep in mind that the positive changes are more common, but they don’t find you. You need to find them. (And if you look in stats, they’re everywhere.)”

“Factfulness is recognizing when we get negative news, and remembering that info about bad events is much more likely to reach us. When things are getting better we often don’t hear about them. This gives us a systematically too negative impression of the world around us, which is very stressful.

To control the negativity instinct, expect bad news.

• Better and bad. Practice distinguishing between a level (e.g. bad) and a direction of change (e.g. better). Convince yourself that things can be both better and bad.
• Good news isn’t news. Good news is almost never reported. So, news is almost always bad. When you see bad news, ask whether equally positive news would’ve reached you.
• Gradual improvement isn’t news. When a trend is gradually improving, with periodic dips, you’re more likely to notice the dips than the overall improvement.
• More news doesn’t equal more suffering. More bad news is sometimes due to better surveillance of suffering, not a worsening world.
• Beware of rosy pasts. People often glorify their early experiences, and nations often glorify their histories.”

Population Growth

“The world population is increasing. Very fast. Roughly a billion people will be added over the next 13 years. That’s true. But it’s not just increasing. The ‘just’ implies that, if nothing is done, the population will just keep on growing. It implies that some drastic action is needed in order to stop the growth. That’s the misconception, and I think it’s based on the same instinct that stopped me and the world from acting sooner to stop Ebola. The instinct to assume lines are straight.”

“UN experts expect that in the year 2100 there will be 2 billion children, the same number as today. They don’t expect the line to continue straight.”

“The world population today is 7.6 billion people, and yes, it’s growing fast. Still, the growth has already started to slow down, and the UN experts are pretty sure it will keep slowing down over the next few decades. They think the curve will flatten out at somewhere between 10–12 billion people by the end of the century.”

“When I was born in 1948, women on average gave birth to 5 children each. After 1965 the number started dropping like it had never done before. Over the last 50 years it dropped all the way to the amazingly low world average of just below 2.5.”

“Without any increase in the number of children being born, and without people living for longer, there will be 1 billion new adults.

The 1 billion new adults come not from new children, but from children and young adults who’ve already been born.

For three generations, this pattern will repeat itself. In 2014, the 2 billion 30-to-45-year-olds will become 45-to 60-year-olds and we’ll have another 1 billion adults. In 2060, the 2 billion 45- to 60-year-olds will become to 60- to 70-year-olds and we’ll have another 1 billion adults. But look at what happens next. From 2060, each generation of 2 billion people will be replaced by another generation of 2 billion people. The fast growth stops.

The large increase in population is going to happen not because there are more children. And not, in the main, because old folks are living longer. In fact UN experts predict that by 2100, world life expectancy will have increased by roughly 11 years, adding 1 billion old people to the total and taking it to around 11 billion. The large increase in population will happen mainly because the children who already exist today are going to grow up and ‘fill up’ the diagram with 3 billion more adults. The ‘fill-up effect’ takes three generations, and then it’s done.”

“The population grew from 1.5 billion in 1900 to 6 billion in 200 because humanity went through a transition from one balance to another during the 20th century, a unique period of human history when two parents on average produced 2+ children who survived to become parents themselves in the next generation.

That period of imbalance is the reason why today the two youngest generations are larger than the others. That period of imbalance is the reason behind the fill-up. But the new balance is already achieved: the annual number of births is no longer increasing. If extreme poverty keeps falling, and sex education and contraception keep spreading, then the world population will keep growing fast, but only until the inevitable fill-up is completed.”

“The poorest 10% combined still have five children on average. And on average, every second family living in extreme poverty loses one of their children before they reach the age of 5. That is shamefully high, but still far better than the ghastly levels that kept population growth down in the bad old times.”

“Once parents see children survive, once the children are no longer needed for child labor, and once the women are educated and have info about and access to contraceptives, across cultures and religions both the men and the women start dreaming of having fewer, well-educated children.

‘Saving poor children just increases the population’ sounds correct, but the opposite is true. Delaying the escape from extreme poverty just increases the population. Every generation kept in extreme poverty will produce an even larger next generation. The only proven method for curbing population growth is to eradicate extreme poverty and give people better lives, including education and contraceptives.”

“The impact of an additional dollar is not the same on different levels. On Level 1, with $1/day, another dollar buys you that extra bucket. That is life-changing. On Level 4, with $64/day, another dollar has almost no impact. But with another $64 a day, you could build a pool or buy a summer house. That’s life-changing for you.”

“Factfulness is recognizing the assumption that a line will just continue straight, and remembering that such lines are rare in reality.

To control the straight line instinct, remember that curves come in different shapes.

• Don’t assume straight lines. Many trends don’t follow straight lines but are S-bends, slides, humps, or doubling lines. No child ever kept up the rate of growth it achieved in its first six months, and no parents would expect it to.”

Fear

“In 1999, I traveled with a couple of Swedish students to visit a traditional midwife in a remote village in Tanzania. I wanted my med students from Level 4 to meet a real health worker on Level 1 instead of just reading about them in books. The midwife had no formal education, and the students’ jaws dropped when she described her struggles, walking between villages to help poor women deliver babies on mud floors in complete darkness with no med equipment or clean water.

One of the students asked, ‘Do you have children of your own?’ ‘Yes,’ she said proudly, ‘2 boys and 2 daughters.’ ‘Will your daughters become midwives like you?’ The old woman threw her body forward and laughed out loud. ‘My daughters! Working like me?! Oh no! Never! Ever! They have nice jobs. They work in front of computers in Dar es Salaam, just like they wanted to.’ The midwife’s daughters had escaped Level 1.

Another student asked, ‘If you could choose one piece of equipment that could make your work easier, what would that be?’ ‘I really want a flashlight,’ she answered. ‘When I walk to a village in the dark, even when the moon is shining, it’s so difficult to see the snakes.’”

“The number of deaths from acts of nature has dropped far below half. It’s not just 25% of what it was 100 years ago. The human population increased by 5 billion people over the same period, so the drop in deaths per capita is even more amazing. It’s fallen to just 6% of what it was 100 years ago.

The reason natural disasters kill so many fewer people today isn’t that nature has changed. It’s that the majority of people no longer live on Level 1. Disasters hit countries on all income levels, but the harm done is very different. With more money comes better preparedness.”

“Back in 1942, Bangladesh was on Level 1 and almost all its citizens were illiterate farmers. Over a two-year period it suffered terrible floods, droughts, and cyclones. No international org came to the rescue and 2 million people died. Today, Bangladesh is on Level 2 and almost all Bangladeshi children finish school, where they learn that three red-and-black flags means everyone must run to the evacuation centers. Today, the government has installed across the country’s huge river delta a digital surveillance system connected to a freely available flood-monitoring site. Just 15 years ago, no country in the world had such an advanced system. When another cyclone hit in 2015, the plan worked and the World Food Programme flew in 113 tons of high-energy biscuits to the 30,000 evacuated families.”

“This graph shows plane crash deaths per 10 billion commercial passenger miles over the last 10 years. Flying has gotten 2,100 times safer.”

“Back in the 1930s, flying was really dangerous and passengers were scared away by the many accidents. Flight authorities across the world had understood the potential of commercial passenger air traffic, but they also realized that flying had to become safer before most people would dare to try it. In 1944 they all met in Chicago to agree on common rules and signed a contract with a very important Annex 13: a common form for incident reports, which they agreed to share, so they could all learn from each other’s mistakes.

Since then, every crash or incident involving a commercial passenger plane has been investigated and reported; risk factors have been systematically identified; and improved safety procedures have been adopted, worldwide. Wow! I’d say the Chicago Convention is one of humanity’s most impressive collaborations ever. It’s amazing how well people can work together when they share the same fears.”

“In 1986 there were 64,000 nuclear warheads in the world; today there are 15,000.”

“One week after 9/11, according to Gallup, 51% of the US public felt worried that a family member would become a victim of terrorism. 14 years later, the figure was the same: 51%. People are almost as scared today as they were the week after the Twin Towers came down.”

“By 2100, more than 80% of the world’s population will live in Africa and Asia.

If the UN forecasts for population growth are correct, and if incomes in Asia and Africa keep growing as now, then the center of gravity of the world market will shift over the next 20 years from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. Today, the people living in rich countries around the North Atlantic, who represent 11% of the world’s population, make up 60% of the Level 4 consumer market. Already by 2027, if incomes keep growing worldwide as they’re doing now, then that figure will have shrunk to 50%. By 2040, 60% of Level 4 consumers will live outside the West. Yes, I think the Western domination of the world economy will soon be over.”

“We usually visit a public hospital. When [my students] see that there’s no paint on the walls and no AC and 60 people to a room, my students whisper to each other that this place must be extremely poor. I have to explain that people living in extreme poverty have no hospitals at all. A woman living in extreme poverty gives birth on a mud floor, attended by a midwife with no training who has walked barefoot in the dark. The hospital administrator helps. She explains that not painting the walls can be a strategic decision in countries on Levels 2 and 3. It’s not that they can’t afford the paint. Flaking walls keep away the richer patients and their time-consuming demands for costly treatments, allowing hospitals to use their limited resources to treat more people in more cost-effective ways.”

“Everything is made from chemicals, all ‘natural’ things and all industrial products. Here are some of my favorites I’d rather not live without: soap, cement, plastic, detergent, toilet paper, and antibiotics. If someone offers you a single example and wants to draw conclusions about a group, ask for more examples. Or flip it over: i.e. ask whether an opposite example would make you draw the opposite conclusion. If you’re happy to conclude that all chemicals are unsafe on the basis of one unsafe chemical, would you be prepared to conclude that all chemicals are safe on the basis of one safe chemical?”

“Mabrouk is 52 and a gardener. His wife, Jamila, is 44 and runs a home-based bakery. Most of their neighbors have similar half-built second floors on their houses. You see this everywhere on Levels 2 and 3 across the world. In Sweden, if someone built their house like that, we would think they had a severe planning problem, or maybe the builders had run away. But you can’t generalize from Sweden to Tunisia.

The Salhis, and many others living in similar circumstances, have found a brilliant way to solve several problems at once. On Levels 2 and 3, families often don’t have access to a bank to put up their savings and cannot get a loan. So, to save up to improve their home, they must pile up money. Money, though, can be stolen or lose its value through inflation. So, instead, whenever they can afford them, the Salhis buy actual bricks, which won’t lose their value. But there’s no space inside to store the bricks and the bricks might get stolen if they’re left in a pile outside. Better to add the bricks to the house as you buy them. Thieves can’t steal them. Inflation won’t change their value. No one needs to check your credit rating. And over 10–15 years you are slowly building your family a better home. Instead of assuming that the Salhis are lazy or disorganized, assume they’re smart and ask yourself, ‘How can this be such a smart solution?’”

The Destiny Instinct

“The destiny instinct is the idea that innate characteristics determine the destinies of people, countries, religions, or cultures. It’s the idea that things are as they are for ineluctable, inescapable reasons: they’ve always been this way and will never change. This instinct makes us believe that our false generalizations or tempting gaps are not only true, but fated: unchanging and unchangeable.

It’s easy to see how this instinct would’ve served an evolutionary purpose. Historically, humans lived in surroundings that didn’t change much. Learning how things worked and then assuming they would continue to work that way rather than constantly reevaluating was probably an excellent survival strategy.

It’s also easy to understand how claiming a particular destiny for your group can come in useful for uniting that group around a supposedly never-changing purpose, and perhaps creating a sense of superiority over other groups. Such ideas must have been important for powering tribes, chiefdoms, nations, and empires. But today, this instinct to see things as unchanging, this instinct not to update our knowledge, blinds us to the revolutionary transformation in societies happening all around us.

Societies and cultures aren’t like rocks, unchanging and unchangeable. They move, Western societies and cultures move, and non-Western societies and cultures move — often much faster. It’s just that all but the fastest cultural changes — the spread of the internet, smartphones, and social media, for example — tend to happen just a bit too slowly to be noticeable or newsworthy.”

“For years after the global crash of 2008, the IMF continued to forecast 3% annual economic growth for countries on Level 4. Each year, for 5 years, the countries on Level 4 failed to meet this forecast. Each year, for 5 years, the IMF said, ‘Next year it’ll get back on track.’ Finally, the IMF realized that there was no ‘normal’ to go back to, and it downgraded its future growth expectations to 2%. At the same time the IMF acknowledged that the fast growth (5%+) during those years had instead happened in countries on Level 2, like Ghana, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Bangladesh.

Why does this matter? One reason is this: the IMF forecasters’ worldview had a strong influence on where your retirement funds were invested. Countries in Europe and North America were expected to experience fast and reliable growth, which made them attractive to investors. When these forecasts turned out to be wrong, and when these countries didn’t in fact grow fast, the retirement funds didn’t grow either. Supposedly low-risk/high-return countries turned out to be high-risk/low-return. And at the same time African countries with great growth potential were being starved of investment.

Another reason it matters, if you work for a company based in the old ‘West,’ is that you’re probably missing opportunities in the largest expansion of the middle-income consumer market in history, which is taking place right now in Africa and Asia. Other, local brands are already establishing a foothold, gaining brand recognition, and spreading throughout these continents, while you’re still waking up to what is going on. The Western consumer market was just a teaser for what is coming next.”

“It was quite an achievement — actually the fastest drop ever, from more than 6 babies per woman [in Iran] in 1984 down to fewer than 3 babies per woman just 15 years later.”

“The fastest drop in babies per woman in world history went completely unreported in the free Western media. Iran — home in the 90s to the biggest condom factory in the world, and boasting a compulsory pre-marriage sex ed course for both brides and grooms — has a highly educated population with excellent access to an advanced public healthcare system. Couples use contraception to achieve small families and have access to infertility clinics if they struggle to conceive. The enthusiastic Professor Malek Afzali designed Iran’s family planning miracle.

How many people in the West would guess that women in Iran today decide to have fewer babies than women in either the US or Sweden? Do we Westerners love free speech so much that it makes us blind to any progress in a country whose regime doesn’t share our love? It is, at least, clear that a free media is no guarantee that the world’s fastest cultural changes will be reported.

Almost every religious tradition has rules about sex, so it is easy to understand why so many people assume that women in some religions give birth to more children. But the link between religion and the number of babies per women is often overstated. There is, though, a strong link between income and number of babies per women.”

“At [my university in Sweden], we ran a secret fund to pay for women to travel abroad to get safe abortions. Jaws drop when I tell the students where these young pregnant students traveled to: Poland, Catholic Poland. Five years later, Poland banned abortion and Sweden legalized it. The flow of young women started to go the other way. The point is, it was not always so. The cultures changed.

I come across the values of stubborn old men like my grandfather all the time when I travel in Asia. For example, in South Korea and Japan, many wives are still expected to take care of their husband’s parents, as well as taking full responsibility for the care of any children. I’ve encountered many men who are proud of these ‘Asian values,’ as they call them. I’ve had conversations with many women too, who see it differently. They find this culture unbearable and tell me these values make them less interested in getting married.

At a banking conference in Hong Kong, I was seated next to a brilliant young banker. She was 37 and enjoying a successful career, and she taught me many things over dinner about current issues and trends in Asia. Then we started talking about our personal lives. ‘Do you plan to have a family?’ I asked. She smiled and looked over my shoulder at the sun setting over the bay. She said, ‘I’m thinking about children every day.’ Then she looked me straight in the eye. ‘It’s the idea of a husband I can’t stand.’”

“The macho values that are found today in many Asian and African countries, these are not Asian or African values. They’re not Muslim values. They’re not Eastern values. They’re patriarchal values like those found in Sweden only 60 years ago, and with social and economic progress they’ll vanish, just as they did in Sweden. They’re not unchangeable.”

“Societies and cultures are in constant movement. Even changes that seem small and slow add up over time: 1% growth each year seems slow but it adds up to a doubling in 70 years; 2% growth each year means doubling in 35 years; 3% growth each year means doubling in 24 years.

In the third century, the world’s first nature reserve was created by King Devanampiya Tissa in Sri Lanka when he declared a piece of forest to be offically protected. It took more than 2,000 years for a European, in West Yorkshire, to get a similar idea, and another 50 years before Yellowstone National Park was established in the US. By 1900, 0.03% of the Earth’s land was protected. By 1930 it was 0.2%. Slowly, slowly, decade by decdae, one forest at a time, the number climbed. The annual increase was absolutely tiny, almost imperceptible. Today a stunning 15% of the Earth’s surface is protected, and the number is still climbing.

To control the destiny instinct, don’t confuse slow change with no change. Don’t dismiss an annual change — even of 1% — because it sees too small and slow.”

Cause and Effect

“The US spends more than twice as much per capita on healthcare as other capitalist countries on Level 4 — around $9,400 compared to around $3,600 — and for that money its citizens can expect lives that are 3 years shorter. Teh US spends more per capita on healthcare than any other country, but 39 countries have longer life expectancies.

“In 2015, 4,000 refugees drowned in the Mediterranean as they tried to reach Europe in inflatable boats. Images of children’s bodies washed up on the shores of holiday destinations evoked horror and compassion. What a tragedy. In our comfortable lives on Level 4, in Europe and elsewhere, we started thinking: How could such a thing happen? Who was to blame?

We soon worked it out. The villains were the cruel and greedy smugglers who tricked desperate families into handing over 1,000 euros per person or their places in inflatable death traps. We stopped thinking and comforted ourselves with images of European rescue boats saving people from the wild waters.

But why weren’t the refugees traveling to Europe on comfortable planes or ferry boats instead of traveling over land to Libya or Turkey and then entrusting their lives to these rickety rubber rafts? After all, EU member states were signed up to the Geneva Convention, and it was clear that refugees from war-torn Syria would be entitled to claim asylum under its terms. I started to ask this question of journalists, friends, and people involved in the reception of the asylum seekers, but even the wisest and kindest among them came up with very strange answers.

Perhaps they couldn’t afford to fly? But we knew that the refugees were paying 1,000 euros for each place on a rubber dingy? I went online and checked and there were plenty of tickets from Turkey to Sweden or from Libya to London for under 50 euros.

Maybe they couldn’t reach the airport? Not true. Many of them were already in Turkey or Lebanon and could easily get to the airport. And they can afford a ticket, and the planes are not overbooked. But at the check-in counter, they’re stopped by the airline staff from getting on the plane. Why? Because of a European Council Directive from 2001 that tells member states how to combat illegal immigration. This directive says that every airline or ferry company that brings a person without proper documents into Europe must pay all the costs of returning that person to their country of origin. Of course the directive also says that it doesn’t apply to refugees who want to come to Europe based on their rights to asylum under the Geneva Convention, only to illegal immigrants. But that claim is meaningless. Because how should someone at the check-in desk at an airline be able to work out in 45 seconds whether someone is a refugee or is not a refugee according to the Geneva Convention? Something that would take the embassy at least 8 months?S It’s impossible. So the practical effect of the reasonable-sounding directive is that commercial airlines will not let anyone board without a visa. And getting a visa is nearly impossible because the European embassies in Turkey and Libya don’t have the resources to process the applications. Refugees from Syria, with the theoretical right to enter Europe under the Geneva Convention, are therefore in practice completely unable to travel by air and so must come over the sea.

Why, then, must they come in such terrible boats? Actually, EU policy is behind that as well, because it’s EU policy to confiscate the boats when they arrive. So boats can be used for one trip only. The smugglers couldn’t afford to send the refugees in safe boats, like the fishing boats that brought 7,000 Jewish refugees from Denmark to Sweden over a few days in 1943, even if they wanted to.

Our European governments claim to be honoring the Geneva Convention that entitles a refugee from a severely war-torn country to apply for and receive asylum. But their immigration policies make a mockery of this claim in practice and directly create the transport market in which the smugglers operate. There’s nothing secret about this; in fact it takes some pretty blurry or blocked thinking not to see it.”

“Most of the human-emitted CO2 accumulated in the atmosphere was emitted over the last 50 years by countries that are now on Level 4. Canada’s per-capita CO2 emissions are still twice as high as China’s and 8x as high as India’s. In fact, do you know how much of all the fossil fuel burned each year is burned by the richest billion? More than half of it. Then the second-richest billion burns half of what’s left, and so on, down to the poorest billion, who are responsible for only 1%.”

“The body’s largest organ is the skin. Before modern medicine, one of the worst imaginable skin diseases was syphilis, which would start as itchy boils and then eat its way into the bones until it exposed the skeleton. The microbe that caused this disgusting sight and unbearable pain had different names in different places. In Russia it was called the Polish disease. In Poland it was the German disease; in Germany, the French disease; and in France, the Italian disease. The Italians blamed back, calling it the French disease.

The instinct to find a scapegoat is so core to human nature that it’s hard to imagine the Swedish people calling the open sores the Swedish disease, or the Russians calling it a Russian disease. That’s not how people work. We need someone to blame and if a single foreigner came here with the disease, then we would happily blame a whole country. No further investigation needed.”

“The pope is credited with enormous influence over the sexual behavior of the 1 billion Catholics in the world. However, despite the clear condemnation of the use of contraception by several successive popes, the stats show that contraceptive use is 60% in Catholic-majority countries, compared with 58% in the rest of the world. In other words, the same. The pope is one of the world’s most prominent moral leaders, but it seems that even leaders with great political power or moral authority don’t have remote controls that can reach into the bedroom.”

“In the poorest rural parts of Africa, it’s still the nuns who maintain many basic health services. Some of these clever, hardworking, and pragmatic women became my closest colleagues.

Sister Linda, whom I worked with in Tanzania, was a devout Catholic nun who dressed in all black and prayed 3x a day. The door to her office was always open and on its outside, the first thing you saw as you entered, was a glossy poster of the pope. One day, she and I were in her office and started discussing a sensitive matter. Sister Linda stood up and closed the door, and for the first time I saw what was on its inside: another large poster and, attached to it, hundreds of little bags of condoms. When Sister Linda saw my surprised face she smiled — as she often did when discovering my countless stereotypes of women like her. ‘The families need them to stop both AIDS and babies,’ she said simply. And then she continued our discussion.”

“I was 4 when I saw my mother load a washing machine for the first time. It was a great day for my mother; she and my father had been saving money for years to be able to buy that machine. Grandma, who’d been invited to the inauguration ceremony for the new washing machine, was even more excited. She’d been heating water with firewood and hand-washing laundry her whole life. Now she was going to watch electricity do that work. She was so excited that she sat on a chair in front of the machine for the entire washing cycle, mesmerized. To her the machine was a miracle.

It was a miracle for my mom and me too. It was a magic machine. Because that very day my mom said to me, ‘Now, Hans, we have loaded the laundry. The machine will do the work. So now we can go to the library.’ In went the laundry, and out came books. Thank you industrialization, thank you steel mill, thank you power station, thank you chemical-processing industry, for giving us the time to read books.”

“Look for causes, not villains. When something goes wrong, don’t look for an individual or a group to blame. Accept that bad things happen without anyone intending them to. Instead spend your energy on understanding the multiple interacting causes, or system, that created the situation.

Look for systems, not heroes. When someone claims to have caused something good, ask whether the outcome might’ve happened anyway, even if that individual had done nothing. Give the system some credit.”

Globalization

“Globalization is a continuing process, not a one-off event. The textiles industry that moved from Europe to Bangladesh and Cambodia as they reached Level 2 some decades ago will likely soon move again as Bangladesh and Cambodia became wealthier and approach Level 3. These countries will have to diversify or suffer the consequences as their textiles jobs are shifted to African countries.

In making investment decisions, you need to shake off any naive views of Africa shaped by the colonial past (and maintained by today’s media) and understand that Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya are where some of the best investment opportunities can be found today.”