54 6 august 2018N
ew facts sourced from
multilateral institutions that in-
clude the united Nations, world
Bank and International Monetary fund
and collated by Brookings Institution
last month showed that extreme pov-
erty in the world has shifted its destina-
tion to Nigeria (with 87 million people
in extreme poverty) from India (73
million). even better, extreme poverty in
India continues to fall. this is a big event.
and yet, the extent of underreporting
on this game-changing, hope-delivering
data was shocking. apart from the
usual stories, the significance of India
rising to a challenge that had seemed
unsurmountable for the better part of
seven decades was lost to the media.
Like all other issues, economic, strategic
or political, the way we view our world
has been contaminated with politics-
led, media-carted, quickly-consumed
negativity, irrespective of facts. In an
age where marriage no longer means
permanent cohabitation, we seem to
be eternally wedded to the idea that the
world is getting worse.
In his book Factfulness: Ten Reasons
We’re Wrong About the World—And Why
Things are Better Than You Think, the
brilliant Hans rosling with son ola and
daughter-in-law anna get under this
wrong notion and present a book that I
believe every journalist, thinker, scholar
and activist must read. In a survey he
conducted across developed nations and
among a wide data set of professionals,
the swedish physician, academic and
statistician asked a related question: In
the last 20 years, the proportion of the
world population living in extreme
poverty has... a) almost doubled, B)
remained more or less the same, and
c) almost halved. Less than 10 per cent
knew the correct answer—c. extreme
poverty has been declining faster than
ever. ‘In 1997, 42% of the population
of both India and china were living in
extreme poverty,’ he writes. ‘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.’
taking a wide range of statistics
totalling 32, from legal slavery and child
labour to smoke particles and hunger,
rosling defines this obsession as the
Negativity Instinct: ‘our instinct to
notice the bad more than the good.’ this
instinct is based on ‘the misremember-
ing of the past; selective reporting by
journalists and activists; the feeling that
as long as things are bad it’s heartless tosay they are getting better’. the Negativ-
ity Instinct is only one of 10 instincts
we suffer from. the single Perspective
Instinct, for instance, exposes us to limit-
ing our worldview to either the media, or
data, or politics, while what we need to
make sense of our world is a diverse set of
windows with which to view it. or the
Generalisation Instinct, through which
we make conclusions based on a small
and limited group. for some, speaking
to a cab driver was enough to decide the
way an entire state will vote, a generalisa-
tion so many political commentators got
hopelessly wrong in India’s elections.
witty, gripping and racy, peppered
with data that doesn’t assault the mind
but soothes it, with insights that yearn to
express themselves in all of us amid the
gloom around us, this book is ‘my very
last battle in my lifelong mission to fight
devastating global ignorance’, rosling
writes. Factfulness is also his last attempt
to change people’s thinking, calm their
irrational fears. using credible statistics,
rosling breaks the bubbles of our world-
view and forces us to look at, well, the
truth. But given the hyper-connected and
instant-commentary world we live in, I
am unsure of his optimism about all of us
moving towards a fact-based worldview,
even if it is a more useful tool to navigate
life and more comfortable because the
‘dramatic one is so negative and terrify-
ing’. that said, it is definitely an approach
with which to design public policy and
educate our journalists, activists and
politicians, for whom I would make it
essential reading. It is a loss to us that
rosling is no longer with us—he died last
year—but with this book, he has made
sure his ideas live on. nbooks
It’s Not All That Bad
An argument against negativity
By Gautam Chikermane
Fact Fulness: ten Reasons
We’Re WRong about the
WoRld—and Why things
aRe betteR than you think
By Hans Rosling with Ola Rosling
and Anna Rosling RonnlundHachette
342 Pages | Rs 499The 10 Instincts That Get Us
To Misread Our World:
The Gap Instinct
The Negativity Instinct
The Straight Line Instinct
The Fear Instinct
The Size Instinct
The Generalisation Instinct
The Destiny Instinct
The Single Perspective Instinct
The Blame Instinct
The Urgency Instinct