Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think (23 page)

Everyone automatically categorizes and generalizes all the time. Unconsciously. It is not a question of being prejudiced or enlightened. Categories are absolutely necessary for us to function. They give structure to our thoughts. Imagine if we saw every item and every scenario as truly unique—we would not even have a language to describe the world around us.

The necessary and useful instinct to generalize, like all the other instincts in this book, can also distort our worldview. It can make us mistakenly group together things, or people, or countries that are actually very different. It can make us assume everything or everyone in one category is similar. And, maybe most unfortunate of all, it can make us jump to conclusions about a whole category based on a few, or even just one, unusual example.

Once again, the media is the instinct’s friend. Misleading generalizations and stereotypes act as a kind of shorthand for the media, providing quick and easy ways to communicate. Here are just a few examples from today’s newspaper: rural life, middle class, super mom, gang member.

When many people become aware of a problematic generalization it is called a stereotype. Most commonly, people talk about race and gender stereotyping. These cause many very important problems, but they are not the only problems caused by wrong generalizations. Wrong generalizations are mind-blockers for all kinds of understanding.

The gap instinct divides the world into “us” and “them,” and the generalization instinct makes “us” think of “them” as all the same.

Are you working for a commercial company on Level 4? There’s a great risk you’re missing the majority of your potential consumers and producers because of your generalizations. Are you working in finance in a big bank? There’s a great risk you are investing your clients’ money in the wrong places, because you’re bundling together people who are vastly different.

To compare ignorance between different kinds of experts, the regular polling companies couldn’t help me. They don’t have access to the staff of big corporations and government organizations. That’s one reason I started polling my audience at the start of my lectures. I have tested a total of 12,596 people at 108 lectures over the last five years. This question gets the worst results. Look at the table on the next page, where I have ranked 12 groups of experts according to how many picked the most incorrect answer.

The worst results come from an annual gathering of global finance managers at the headquarters of one of the world’s ten largest banks. I have visited three of them. I can’t tell you which one this was, because I signed a piece of paper. A roaring 85 percent of the 71 well-dressed bankers in the room believed that a minority of the world’s children had been vaccinated. An extremely wrong answer.

Vaccines must be kept cold all the way from the factory to the arm of the child. They are shipped in refrigerated containers to harbors around the world, where they get loaded into refrigerated trucks. These trucks take them to local health clinics, where they are stored in refrigerators. These logistic distribution paths are called cool chains. For cool chains to work, you need all the basic infrastructure for transport, electricity, education, and health care to be in place. This is exactly the same infrastructure needed to establish new factories. The fact that 88 percent are vaccinated but major financial investors believe it is only 20 percent indicates that there is a big chance they are failing at their jobs by missing out on huge investment opportunities (probably the most profitable ones in the fastest-growing parts of the world).

You make this kind of false assumption when you have a “them” category in your head, into which you put the majority of humanity. What images are you using to imagine what life is like in this category? Are you perhaps recalling the most vivid and disturbing images from the news? I think that is exactly what’s going on when people on Level 4 answer this badly on this kind of fact question. The extreme deprivation we see on the news ends up stereotyping the majority of mankind.

Every pregnancy results in roughly two years of lost menstruation. If you are a manufacturer of menstrual pads, this is bad for business. So you ought to know about, and be so happy about, the drop in babies per woman across the world. You ought to know and be happy too about the growth in the number of educated women working away from home. Because these developments have created an exploding market for your products over the last few decades among billions of menstruating women now living on Levels 2 and 3.

But, as I realized when I attended an internal meeting at one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of sanitary wear, most Western manufacturers have completely missed this. Instead, when hunting for new customers they are often stuck dreaming up new needs among the 300 million menstruating women on Level 4. “What if we market an even thinner pad for bikinis? What about pads that are invisible, to wear under Lycra? How about one pad for each kind of outfit, each situation, each sport? Special pads for mountain climbers!” Ideally, all the pads are so small they need to be replaced several times a day. But like most rich consumer markets, the basic needs are already met, and producers fight in vain to create demand in ever-smaller segments.

Meanwhile, on Levels 2 and 3, roughly 2 billion menstruating women have few alternatives to choose from. These women don’t wear Lycra and won’t spend money on ultrathin pads. They demand a low-cost pad that will be reliable throughout the day so they don’t have to change it when they are out at work. And when they find a product they like, they will probably stick to that brand for their whole lives and recommend it to their daughters.

The same logic applies to many other consumer products, and I have given hundreds of lectures to business leaders making this same point. The majority of the world population is steadily moving up the levels. The number of people on Level 3 will increase from two billion to four billion between now and 2040. Almost everyone in the world is becoming a consumer. If you suffer from the misconception that most of the world is still too poor to buy anything at all, you risk missing out on the biggest economic opportunity in world history while you use your marketing spend to push special “yoga” pads to wealthy hipsters in the biggest cities in Europe. Strategic business planners need a fact-based worldview to find their future customers.

You need the generalization instinct to live your everyday life, and occasionally it can save you from having to eat something disgusting. We always need categories. The challenge is to realize which of our simple categories are misleading—like “developed” and “developing” countries—and replace them with better categories, like the four levels.

One of the best ways to do this is to travel, if you possibly can. That’s why I made my global health students from Karolinska Institutet, the medical university in Stockholm, go on study visits to countries on Levels 1, 2, and 3, where they attended university courses, visited hospitals, and stayed with local families. Nothing beats a firsthand experience.

Those students are usually privileged young Swedes who want to do good in the world but don’t really know the world. Some of them say they have traveled: often they have had a cappuccino at a caf
é
next to an eco-tourism agency, but never entered a single family home.

On day one of a trip to Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala in India, or Kampala in Uganda, they usually express surprise that the city is so well organized. There are traffic lights and sewage systems and no one is dying in the street.

On day two, we usually visit a public hospital. When they see that there is no paint on the walls and no air-conditioning 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.

My students then learn that one of the patients cannot afford to pay for the insulin he has been prescribed for his newly diagnosed diabetes. The students don’t understand: this must be an advanced hospital if it can diagnose diabetes. But how bizarre if the patient cannot then afford the treatment. Yet this is very common on Level 2: the public health system can pay for some diagnosis, for emergency care, and for inexpensive drugs. This leads to great improvements in survival rates. But there’s simply not enough money (unless the costs come down) for expensive treatments for lifelong conditions like diabetes.

On one particular occasion a student’s misunderstanding of life in countries on Level 2 nearly cost her very dearly. We were visiting a beautiful and modern private hospital in Kerala, India, eight stories tall. We waited some time in the lobby for a student in our group who was late. After 15 minutes, we decided not to wait for her any longer and walked down a corridor and got into a large elevator, big enough to take several hospital beds. Our host, the head of the intensive care unit, pressed the button for the sixth floor. Just as the doors were sliding closed, we saw the young blond Swede rush into the hospital lobby. “Come, run faster!” shouted her friend from the door of the elevator, and she stretched her leg out to stop the doors from closing. Everything then happened very quickly. The doors just continued to close tightly around my student’s leg. She cried out in pain and fear. The elevator started moving upward. She cried out louder. Just as I realized this young woman’s leg was going to get crushed against the top of the doorway, our host leaped across the elevator and hit the red emergency stop button. He hissed at me to help and between us we prised the doors far enough apart to release my student’s bleeding limb.