📚 The Book in 3 Bullets

• The world is getting better in almost every aspect even though most people assume it is getting worse. Look at real global statistics before making inferences, not the news networks.

• Often, it is the extremes that get broadcasted, but in reality, the majority is almost always in the middle.

• The world is constantly changing. The “poorer” countries in Asia and Africa are expected to grow substantially throughout the rest of the century. Get rid of the stigma that people in Africa and Asia will always be poor.

👤 Who Should Read It?

• Anyone open to changing their global perception. This book will make you rethink how you think about the world and will give you a bit of hope for the world moving forward.

🌎 How the Book Changed Me

• This book has made me realize how our assumptions of the world becoming worse and more dangerous are completely wrong. It has opened my eyes to the progress that has been made and has given me hope. This book has also made me want to travel to countries that have higher rates of poverty such as Africa and Asia to see just how different their daily lives are from most of us in the US.

📖 Summary & Notes

• Over the past 20 years, the proportion of the global population living in extreme poverty has halved.

• Almost all children are vaccinated in the world today. This is amazing. It means that almost all human beings today have some access to basic modern healthcare. But most people do not know this.

• Year by year, the world is improving. Not on every single measure every single year, but as a rule. Though the world faces huge challenges, we have made tremendous progress. This is the fact-based worldview.

• Illusions don’t happen in our eyes, they happen in our brains.

• The human brain is a product of millions of years of evolution, and we are hardwired with instincts that helped our ancestors survive in small groups of hunters and gatherers.

• We are interested in gossip and traumatic stories, which used to be the only source of news and useful information. 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 today.

The Gap Instinct

• You won’t find any countries where child mortality has increased. Because the world is generally getting better.

• Today, most people are in the middle. There’s no gap between the west and the rest, between developed and developing, between rich and poor, and we should all stop using the simple pairs of categories that suggest there is.

• Today, most people, 75%, live in middle-income countries. Not poor, not rich, but somewhere in the middle of starting to live a reasonable life.

• Most people think the world lives in low-income countries. But only 9% of the world actually lives in low-income countries.

• 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 the majority stuck in misery and deprivation is an illusion.

• Averages mislead by hiding a spread in a single number.

• There will always be the richest and the poorest, but the majority is usually to be found in the middle, and it tells a very different story.

• To control the gap instinct, look for the majority.

• Beware comparisons of extremes. The majority is usually somewhere in between, right where the gap is supposed to be.

The Negativity Instinct

• It’s easy to be aware of all the bad things happening in the world. It’s harder to know about the good things: billions of improvements that are never reported.

• Just 20 years ago, 29% of the world's population lived in extreme poverty. Now that number is 9%.

• The negativity instinct is because we 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 are getting better.

• We are subjected to never-ending cascades of negative news from across the world: wars, famine, natural disasters, political mistakes, corruption, budget, cuts, diseases, mass layoffs, and acts of terror. The journalists who reported flights that didn’t crash or crops that didn’t fail would quickly lose their jobs. Stories about gradual improvements, rarely make the front page, even when they occur on a dramatic scale and impact millions.

• In the United States, the crime rate has been on a downward trend since 1990. Just under 14.5 million crimes were reported in 1990. By 2016, that figure was well under 9.5 million. But the majority of people think crime is increasing

• Everything is not fine. We should still be concerned. As long as there are plane crashes, preventable child deaths, endangered species, climate change deniers, crazy dictators, toxic waste, journalists in prison, and girls not getting an education because of their gender, as long as any such terrible things exist, we cannot relax. But don’t forget to look at the progress that has been made.

• To control the negativity instinct is to constantly expect bad news. Remember that the media relies on drama to grab your attention. Remember how simple it is to construct a story of crisis from a temporary dip pulled out of the context of a long-term improvement.

• When you hear about something terrible, calm yourself by asking, if there had been an equally large positive improvement, would I still have heard about it?

• Keep in mind that positive changes may be more common, but they don’t find you. You need to find them.

• Recognize when we get negative news, that information about bad events is much more likely to reach us. When things are getting better, we often don’t hear about them.

• Things can be both better and bad.

• The good news is almost never reported. So the news is almost always bad.

• Gradual improvement is not news. When a trend is gradually improving, with periodic dips, you’re more likely to notice the dips than the overall improvement.

• More news does not 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.

The Straight Line Instinct

• The annual number of births in the world has already stopped increasing, which means that the period of fast population growth will soon be over.

• In general, where income is higher, health is better.

• Don’t assume straight lines. Many trends do not follow straight lines, but are S-bends, slides, humps, or doubling lines.

The Fear Instinct

• Of all our dramatic instincts, it seems to be the fear instinct that most strongly influences what information gets selected by news, producers, and presented to us, consumers.

• The image of a dangerous world has never been broadcast more effectively than it is now, while the world has never been less violent and safer.

• The death rate is always higher when a natural disaster hits a country on level one, because of poorly constructed buildings, poor infrastructure, and poor medical facilities.

• In 2016, a total of 40 million commercial passenger flights landed safely at their destinations. Only 10 ended in fatal accidents, of course, those were the ones the journalist wrote about: 0.000025% of the total.

• In the United States, the risk that your loved one will be killed by a drunk person is nearly 50 times higher than the risk he or she will be killed by a terrorist.

• The fear instinct is a terrible guide for understanding the world. It makes us give our attention to the unlikely dangers that we are most afraid of, and neglect what is actually most risky.

• Natural disasters account for .1% of all deaths, plane crashes .001%, murders .7%, nuclear leaks 0%, and terrorism .05%.

• Recognize when frightening things get our attention, and remember that these are not necessarily the riskiest.

• The world seems scarier than it is because what you hear about has been selected by your own attention filter, or by the media, precisely because it is scary.

• When you are afraid, you see the world differently. Make as few decisions as possible until the panic has subsided.

The Size Instinct

• By the end of the century, the UN expects there to be almost no change in population in the Americas and Europe, but 3 billion more people in Africa, and 1 billion more in Asia.

• More than 80% of the world's population will live in Africa and Asia by the end of the century.

• If these predictions are correct, and if incomes in Asia and Africa keep growing as now, the center of gravity of the world market will shift over the next 20 years from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean

• In 1950, 15 babies died out of 100 babies who were born before their first birthday. In 2016, 141 million children were born and 4.2 million died. Dividing the number of births by the number of deaths comes out to just 3%. When we compare rates, rather than amounts of dead children, the more recent number suddenly seems astonishingly low.

• To control the size instinct, get things in proportion. Compare. Big numbers always look big. Single numbers on their own are misleading and should make you suspicious. Always look for comparisons. Ideally, divided by something.

• Divide. Amounts and rates can tell very different stories. Rates are more meaningful, especially when comparing different-sized groups. In particular, look for rates per person, when comparing between countries or regions.

The Generalization Instinct

• Visit www.dollarstreet.org to see how different countries and levels of income live.

• Look for differences within groups. Especially when the groups are large, look for ways to split them into smaller, more precise categories. And look for similarities across groups. If you find striking similarities between groups, consider whether your categories are relevant. But also look for differences across groups. Don’t assume that what applies to one group applies to another.

• Assume people are not idiots. When something looks strange, be curious, and humble, and think, in what way is this a smart solution?

The Destiny Instinct

• To control the destiny instinct, stay open to new data, and be prepared to keep freshening up your knowledge.

• Keep track of gradual improvements. A small change every year can translate to huge changes over decades.

• Update your knowledge. Some knowledge goes out of date quickly. Technology, countries, societies, cultures, and religions are constantly changing.

• Talk to grandpa. If you want to be reminded how values have changed, think about your grandparent's values, and how they differ from yours.

• Collect examples of cultural change. Challenge the idea that today’s culture must’ve also been yesterdays, and will also be tomorrow.

The Single Perspective Instinct

• Constantly test your favorite ideas for weakness. Be humble about the extent of your expertise. Be curious about new information that doesn’t fit, and information from other fields. And rather than talking only to people who agree with you, or collecting examples that fit your ideas, see people who contradict you, who disagree with you, and put forward different ideas as a great resource, for understanding the world.

• Visit the Red List, where you can access the status of all endangered species in the world.

• It is often the availability of electricity rather than more textbooks, or even more teachers in the classroom that has the most impact on learning, as students can do their homework after sunset.

• The United States is the sickest of the rich. They spend more than twice as much per capita on healthcare as other capitalist countries on level four. Around $9400 compared to around $3600 and for that money its citizens can expect lives that are three years shorter. The United States spends more per capita on healthcare than any other country in the world, but 39 countries have longer life expectancies.

• Under the current US system, rich, insured patients visit doctors more than they need, running up costs while poor patients cannot afford even simple, and expensive treatments, and die younger than they should.

• Recognize it is better to look at problems from many angles to get a more accurate understanding and find practical solutions. To control the single perspective instinct, get a toolbox, not a hammer. You don’t want everything to look like a nail when you have a hammer.

• Test your ideas and have people who disagree with you test your ideas and find their weaknesses.

• Be humble about what you don’t know. Be aware too of the limits of the expertise of others.

• If you are good with a tool, you may want to use it too often. Remember that no one tool is good for everything.

• Beware of simple ideas and simple solutions. Welcome complexity. Combine ideas. Compromise.

The Blame Instinct

• It seems natural for humans to decide that when things go wrong, it must be because of some bad individual with bad intentions. We like to believe that things happen because someone wanted them to, and that individuals have power. Otherwise, the world feels unpredictable, confusing, and frightening.

• When abortion is made illegal, it doesn’t stop abortions from happening, but it does make abortions more dangerous, and increase the risk of women dying as a result.

• 80% of people have access to electricity. It’s unstable and there are often power outages, but the world is getting there.

• Except that bad things can happen without anyone intending them to. Instead, spend your energy on understanding the multiple interacting causes, or systems, that created the situation.

• When someone claims to have caused something good, ask whether the outcome might have happened anyway even if the individual had done nothing.

The Urgency Instinct

• Fear plus urgency make for stupid drastic decisions with unpredictable side effects.

• The Spanish flu that spread across the world in the wake of the first world war killed 50 million people—more people than the war had, although that was partly because the populations were already weekend after four years of war.

• The richest countries, emit by far the most carbon dioxide and must start improving first before wasting time pressuring others.

• Recognize when a decision feels urgent and remember that it rarely is. Ask for more time and more information. It’s rarely now or never and it’s rarely either/or.

• If something is urgent and important, it should be measured. Beware of data that is relevant, but inaccurate, or accurate, but irrelevant.

• Any prediction about the future is uncertain. Be wary of predictions and insist on a full range of scenarios, never just the best or worst case. Ask how often such predictions have been right before.

Factfulness In Practice

• We should be teaching our children that there are countries on all different levels of health and income and that most are in the middle.

• We should be teaching children how to hold two ideas at the same time: that bad things are going on in the world, but that many things are getting better.

• We should be teaching them how to consume the news and spot the drama without becoming stressed or hopeless.

• When you do have an opinion, be prepared to change it when you discover new facts. It is quite relaxing to be humble because it means you can stop feeling pressured to have a view about everything, and stop feeling you must be ready to defend your views all the time.

• Being curious means being open to new information and actively seeking it out. It means embracing facts that don’t fit your worldview and trying to understand their implications. It means letting your mistakes trigger curiosity instead of embarrassment.

• In making investment decisions, you need to shake off any naïve views of Africa shaped by the colonial past, and understand that Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya are where some of the best investment opportunities can be found today.

• The news is not useful for understanding the world.

• When we have a fact-based worldview, we can see that the world is not as bad as it seems—and we can see what we have to do to keep making it better.