Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think (40 page)

Data for 2017.
Throughout the book, where economic indicators do not extend to 2017, Gapminder has extended the series, mainly using forecasts from the World Economic Outlook from IMF[1]. For extending demographic data, we have used the World Population Prospect 2017, see UN-Pop[1]. See gapm.io/eext.

Country boundaries.
Throughout the book, we refer to countries in the past as if they always had the boundaries they have today. For example, we talk about Bangladesh’s family sizes and life expectancy in 1942 as if it had been an independent country at that time, although in reality it was still under British rule as part of British India. See gapm.io/geob.

World Health Chart 2017.
When you open the book, you see a colorful chart: the World Health Chart 2017. Each bubble is a country. The size of the bubble represents the country’s population, and the color of the bubble its geographical region. On the x-axis is GDP per capita (PPP in constant 2011 international $) and on the y-axis life expectancy. The population data comes from UN-Pop[1], the GDP data from World Bank[1], and the life expectancy data from IHME[1], all extended to 2017 by Gapminder as described above. This chart, together with more information about the sources, is freely available at
www.gapminder.org/whc
.

X-ray.
Th
e
X-ray was taken by Staffan Bremmer at Sophiahemmet in Stockholm. The sword swallower is a friend of Hans’s, called Maryanne Magdalen. Her website is here: gapm.io/xsword.

Fact questions.
The 13 fact questions are freely available in multiple languages at
www.gapminder.org/test/2017
.

Online polls.
Gapminder worked with Ipsos MORI and Novus to test 12,000 people in 14 countries. Their polls were conducted with online panels weighted to be representative of the adult populations—Ipsos MORI[1] and Novus[1]. The average number of correct answers for the 12 questions (i.e., excluding question 13 on climate change) was 2.2, which we rounded to 2. See more at gapm.io/rtest17.

Poll results.
The results of the online polls by question and country are set out in the appendix. For the results of the polls we have conducted in our lectures, see gapm.io/rrs.

World Economic Forum lecture
. For a video recording of the lecture (the audience receives its results five minutes and 18 seconds in), see WEF.

Fact Question 1:
Correct answer is C. Sixty percent of the girls in low-income countries finish primary school. According to World Bank[3], the number is 63.2 percent, but we rounded it to 60 percent to avoid overstating progress. See gapm.io/q1.

Fact Question 2:
Correct answer is B. The majority of people live in middle-income countries. The World Bank[2] divides countries into income groups based on gross national income per capita in current US $. According to the World Bank[4], the low-income countries represent 9 percent of the world population, the middle-income countries, 76 percent of the world population, and the high-income countries, 16 percent of the world population. See gapm.io/q2.

Fact Question 3:
Correct answer is C. The share of people living on less than $1.9/day fell from 34 percent in 1993 to 10.7 percent in 2013, according to World Bank[5]. Despite the impression of precision given by the precise threshold of $1.9/day and the use of decimals, the uncertainties in these numbers are very large. Extreme poverty is very difficult to measure: the poorest people are mostly subsistence farmers or destitute slum dwellers, with unpredictable and constantly changing living conditions and few documented monetary transactions. But even if the exact levels are uncertain, the trend direction is not uncertain, because the sources of error are probably constant over time. We can trust that the level has fallen to at least half, if not one-third. See gapm.io/q3.

Fact Question 4:
Correct answer is C. The average global life expectancy for those born in 2016 was 72.48 years, according to IHME[1]. The UN-Pop[3] estimate is slightly lower, at 71.9 years. We rounded to 70 to avoid overstating progress. See gapm.io/q4.

Fact Question 5:
Correct answer is C. For the past ten years, UN-Pop[2] has published forecasts predicting that the number of children in the year 2100 will not be higher than it is today. See gapm.io/q5.

Fact Question 6:
Correct answer is B. In their forecasts, the experts at the UN Population Division calculate that 1 percent of the population increase will come from 0.37 billion more children (age 0–14), 69 percent from 2.5 billion more adults (age 15 to 74), and 30 percent from 1.1 billion more very old people (age 75 and older). Data is from UN-Pop[3]. See gapm.io/q6.

Fact Question 7:
Correct answer is C. Annual deaths from natural disasters have decreased by 75 percent over the past 100 years, according to the International Disaster Database; see EM-DAT. Since disasters vary from year to year, we compare ten-year averages. In the last ten years (2007–2016), on average 80,386 people were killed by natural disasters per year. This is 25 percent of the number 100 years earlier (1907–1916), when it was 325,742 deaths per year. See gapm.io/q7.

Fact Question 8:
Correct answer is A. The world population in 2017 is 7.55 billion, according to UN-Pop[1]. That would usually be rounded to eight billion, but we show seven billion because we are rounding the population region by region. The populations of the four Gapminder[1] regions were estimated based on national data from UN-Pop[1]: the Americas, 1.0 billion; Europe, 0.84 billion; Africa, 1.3 billion; Asia, 4.4 billion. See gapm.io/q8.

Fact Question 9:
Correct answer is C. Eighty-eight percent of one-year-old children in the world today are vaccinated against some disease, according to WHO[1]. We rounded it down to 80 percent to avoid overstating progress. See gapm.io/q9.

Fact Question 10:
Correct answer is A. Worldwide, women aged 25 to 34 have an average of 9.09 years of schooling, and men have 10.21, according to IHME[2] estimates from 188 countries. Women aged 25 to 29 have an average of 8.79 years of schooling, and men 9.32 years, according to Barro and Lee (2013) estimates from 146 countries in 2010. See gapm.io/q10.

Fact Question 11:
Correct answer is C. None of the three species are classified as more critically endangered today than they were in 1996, according to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. The tiger (
Panthera tigris
) was classified as Endangered (EN) in 1996, and it still is; see IUCN Red List[1]. But after a century of decline, tiger numbers in the wild are on the rise, according to WWF and Platt (2016). According to IUCN Red List[2], the giant panda (
Ailuropoda melanoleuca
) was classified as Endangered (EN) in 1996, but in 2015, new assessments of increasing wild populations resulted in a change of classification to the less critical status Vulnerable (VU). The black rhino (
Diceros bicornis
) was classified as Critically Endangered (CR) and still is; see IUCN Red List[3]. But the International Rhino Foundation says many populations in the wild are slowly increasing. See gapm.io/q11.

Fact Question 12:
Correct answer is C. A majority of the world population, 85.3 percent, had some access to the electricity grid in their countries, according to GTF. We rounded this down to 80 percent to avoid overstating progress. The term “access” is defined differently in all their underlying sources. In some extreme cases, households may experience an average of 60 power outages per week and still be listed as “having access to electricity.” The question, accordingly, talks about “some” access. See gapm.io/q12.

Fact Question 13:
Correct answer is A. “Climate experts” refers to the 274 authors of the IPCC[1] Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), published in 2014 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), who write, “Surface temperature is projected to rise over the 21st century under all assessed emission scenarios”; see IPCC[2]. See gapm.io/q13.

Illusions.
The idea of explaining cognitive biases using the M
ü
ller-Lyer illusion comes from
Thinking, Fast and Slow,
by Daniel Kahneman (2011).

The ten instincts and cognitive psychology.
Our thinking on the ten instincts was influenced by the work of a number of brilliant cognitive scientists. Some of the books that completely changed our thinking about the mind and about how we should teach facts about the world are: Dan Ariely,
Predictably Irrational
(2008),
The Upside of Irrationality
(2010), and
The Honest Truth About Dishonesty
(2012); Steven Pinker
, How the Mind Works
(1997),
The Stuff of Thought
(2007),
The Blank Slate
(2002), and
The Better Angels of Our Nature
(2011); Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson,
Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)
(2007); Daniel Kahneman,
Thinking, Fast and Slow
(2011); Walter Mischel,
The Marshmallow Test
(2014); Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner,
Superforecasting
(2015); Jonathan Gottschall,
The Storytelling Animal
(2012); Jonathan Haidt,
The Happiness Hypothesis
(2006) and
The Righteous Mind
(2012); and Thomas Gilovich,
How We Know What Isn’t So
(1991).

Child mortality.
The child mortality data used in the 1995 lecture came from UNICEF[1]. In this book we have updated the examples and use the new mortality data from UN-IGME.

Bubble charts.
The bubble charts on family size and child survival rates in 1965 and 2017 use data from UN-Pop[1,3,4] and UN-IGME. An interactive version of the chart is freely available here: gapm.io/voutdwv.

Low-income countries.
Gapminder has asked the public in the United States and Sweden how they imagine life in “low-income countries” or “developing countries.” They systematically guessed numbers that would have been correct 30 or 40 years ago. See gapm.io/rdev.

The primary school completion rate for girls is below 35 percent in just three countries. But for all three, the uncertainty is high and the numbers are outdated: Afghanistan (1993), 15 percent; South Sudan (2011), 18 percent; Chad (2011), 30 percent. Three other countries (Somalia, Syria, and Libya) have no official number. The girls in these six countries suffer under severe gender inequality, but in total they make up only 2 percent of all girls of primary school age in the world, based on UN-Pop[4]. Note that in these countries, many boys are also missing school. See gapm.io/twmedu.

Income levels.
The numbers of people on the four income levels have been defined by Gapminder[8] based on data from PovcalNet and forecasts from IMF[1]. Incomes are adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity $ 2011 from ICP. See gapm.io/fwlevels.

The graphs showing people distributed by income, comparing incomes in Mexico and the United States in 2016, are based on the same data, slightly adjusted to align with the shape of the distributions from the latest available national income surveys. Brazil’s numbers come from World Bank[16], PovcalNet, slightly adjusted to better align with CETAD. See gapm.io/ffinex.