7 September 2019 | New Scientist | 47Climate change is one area where the book has
been criticised, as it doesn’t fit with your “things
are getting better” narrative. How do you
respond to that?
I’m frustrated by that criticism because it’s
absolutely false to claim that the book neglects
climate change. In the last chapter, it is one of
five global risks we identify [along with global
pandemics, financial collapses, a third world
war and extreme poverty].
The reason to not believe that everything
is getting worse is to sharpen our focus, so that
we can look at these five things that are super
dangerous. Climate is among them. Criticising
the book for not addressing climate change
pretty much indicates that they haven’t read
the whole book.The book lays out how to adopt a factfulness
mindset to help develop an evidence-based
viewpoint. How did you acquire this mindset?
I think I internalised it while growing up.
My father and I had long conversations
and he taught me to think this way.
He taught himself to think this way.
Sometimes you have heuristics that you’re
not aware of because no one has put a label
on them. When we wrote the book, we sat
down and labelled things, we invented names
for these rules of thumb. Those are concrete
principles to factfulness.bad. It becomes intuitive to assume that the
world is becoming worse and then people pick
the worst of options in the Gapminder test.Do you think we can learn from children and their
lack of preconceptions? For example, the climate
strikes led by Greta Thunberg show that
sometimes adults don’t get it right.
I have a huge respect for what Greta has
done. She made my kids care about climate
change, something I couldn’t do.Many of the kids striking don’t have a clue
about climate change but they are morally
concerned about a grown-up society who
cannot answer their questions. This is super
important, just as learning the facts about the
topic. Gapminder is currently developing a
specific test about climate change, which will
help us see if these kids and people around the
world are ignorant or not in this area.generations could survive. We are their
offspring, so we tend to use the same tactics,
except that we don’t need them anymore. I am
not a researcher in these fields, but it seems
like humans are predisposed to focus on the
negative things we hear, to see problems.
When we are asked about the world, we look
into our minds and – no surprise – find our
preconceived ideas and all the negative things
we have heard. Then the big picture turns bad.
How can we compensate for this?
By creating the habit of being factful. Today
there is data about almost everything. It is the
first time in human history when we can look
back at the numbers. The data often show a
completely different picture, so we need to
keep track of what is actually true, the facts.
You use a test about global facts and even
Nobel prizewinners are terrible at them, scoring
worse than they would with random guesses.
Do we become more ignorant as we age?
Toddlers and chimpanzees are often much
better than grown-ups when answering our
test. This is because they choose randomly
and not because they understand or think
about the questions. At some point in life,
misconceptions are introduced: we see news
about a terror attack or natural disasters, and
the world out there turns out to be something
2018
Number of people
by income02 05 1 2 5 10 20 50 100 200 500$/dayEXTREME POVERTY72 years
Global average life
expectancy at birth>