Tag Archives: Factfulness

Some Things Never Change: the Destiny Instinct

Posted on November 27, 2025 | 2 comments

When I was a kid in 1950’s Maryland, Thanksgiving was all about the Pilgrims and the friendly Indians in Massachusetts. Before sitting down to turkey and stuffing at Grandma’s house, I’d probably participated in an earlier school Thanksgiving pageant, its prize roles going to the Indian Squanto and to Massachusetts governor William Bradford. We made paper cutouts of Pilgrim hats, or paper headdresses of fake feathers. It was pretty much the same every year.

Much later, after I’d lived near Virginia’s coastal plains for decades, I went to watch a celebration of the Virginia version of the first Thanksgiving—held, locals bragged, before the Massachusetts pilgrims had even landed. At what later became Berkeley Plantation, according to its website (https://berkeleyplantation.com/first-thanksgiving), in late November, 1619, a newly arrived set of 50 additional Virginia settlers gave thanks, per instructions from their sponsors back in England: “We ordaine that this day of our ships arrival, at the place assigned for plantacon, in the land of Virginia, shall be yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of Thanksgiving to Almighty God.” Little thought back then was given to the perspectives of the native peoples who were often being displaced, diseased, and/or disrespected by the growing numbers of European settlers coming to Virginia, Massachusetts, and other areas up and down the Eastern seaboard of North America. You have to read beyond the Thanksgiving chapter of the Berkeley website to learn that in 1622, local tribes rose up in a concerted attack against the British settlers, after which the Berkeley settlement disintegrated. The next Thanksgiving celebration at Berkeley was not until 1958.

I now live in California, where origin stories for Thanksgiving are multiple and murky. It’s possible that the earliest Spanish or Russian explorers had celebrations of thanksgiving after surviving especially difficult passages. Later specific dates for California’s initial celebrations are variously given as: December 10, 1774, when some of the Franciscan missionaries in the area celebrated a near-miraculous return to health of one of their brothers; or November 29, 1849 in and around the goldfields; or November 30, 1850, based on a proclamation by Governor Peter Burnett in Sacramento in the newly established State of California. The safest date to recognize may be the 1863 proclamation by Abraham Lincoln of the first national day of Thanksgiving on the last Thursday of November.

Wherever we live in the U.S., there seem to be a wealth of “first Thanksgivings” to choose from. Our views of what’s appropriate for Thanksgiving and “who got there first” will likely continue to change.

The book Factfulness was written by three Swedes, so there are no examples of Thanksgivings and the way the feast has changed. However, the authors use multiple examples to show that many things do change, if sometimes slowly. One example I especially like is Hans Rosling’s analysis of the compounding impact of slow changes for Earth’s nature preserves and natural parks. Under the rubric “Slow Change Is Not No Change,” he begins with an initial set-aside of natural land nearly 2500 years ago:

“In the third century BC, the world’s first nature reserve was created by King Devanampiya Tessa in Sri Lanka. … It took more than 2000 years for a European, in West Yorkshire, to get a similar idea, and another 50 years before Yellowstone National Park was established in the United States. By the year 1900, 0.03 percent of the Earth’s land surface as protected. …Slowly, slowly, decade by decade, one forest at a time, the numbers climbed. The annual increase was absolutely tiny, almost imperceptible. Today a stunning 15 percent of the Earth’s surface is protected, and the number is still climbing.” (One globally ambitions goal is to have 30% of the earth’s land and seas protected by 2030: https://www.campaignfornature.org/getting-to-30.)

Of course, change can be multi-directional. There’s no guarantee all change will be positive. But the notion that things cannot change can prevent much of the experimentation that might help improve things.

Among the prescriptions the Roslings suggest for countering the “destiny instinct” are exercises like the one I’ve tried to develop here about Thanksgiving—the way we now think about and celebrate Thanksgiving is not the same as when I was a child, nor need it be the way people will celebrate in the future. Per the Roslings, “Challenge the idea that today’s culture must also have been yesterday’s, and will also be tomorrow’s.”

In a long life so far, among the things that have not changed for me are gratitude for life. I’m also grateful for new and renewed possibilities for continued learning. Happy Thanksgiving to all!

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Posted in holidays, Quandaries and Rants, Uncategorized

Tagged Berkeley Plantation, Factfulness, first Thanksgiving, Massachusetts Bay Colony, native Americans, natural parks, nature preserves, Pilgrims, Rosling, slow change is not no change, Thanksgiving

The Elephants in the Room: The Size and Generalization Instincts

Posted on November 22, 2025 | 1 comment

To me, two of the middle instincts described in the book Factfulness seem closely related: the “size instinct” and the “generalization instinct.” Both can cause us to misjudge the importance of a given factor in a situation.

Hans Rosling describes the size instinct with the following anecdote: early in his career, he spent time as a primary care doctor at the only hospital in a mostly rural, poor area of an African country. A pediatrician friend from Sweden had come for a short visit. After observing Rosling’s behavior during the previous night’s hospital shifts, he took Rosling to task for providing basic care, but not using heroic, complex measures to save a child who’d been admitted to the hospital, suffering from diarrhea and malnutrition. Rosling countered—right now he was the only medical professional in the area with skills to do the procedure needed to save that one child, which would also have required expensive equipment. Over time, he could save many more children by training other medical professionals to provide basic rural health care and by improving the equipment available to them. That way, far fewer children would have to be admitted to the hospital needing complex, heroic measures. Concentrating on that one critically ill child distorted its importance and actually reduced the chances of making a substantial difference in the area’s rates of child mortality.

Per the book’s authors, the somewhat related generalization instinct is often needed to help us live our everyday lives and to make decisions. The problem comes when we overgeneralize—Roslings’ favorite target is the overgeneralization of “developed” and “developing” countries. According to them, “The challenge is to realize which of our categories are misleading … and replace them with better categories.”

To me, our tendencies both to over-categorize and/or to over-stress an isolated case show up in a persistent quandary in journalistic ethics (yes—there is such a thing). Journalists in all media learn fairly early that most people are drawn to stories. In contrast, most of us tend to find statistics boring and overly dry. So, “if it bleeds, it ledes”—journalistic shorthand for telling a compelling story. Ideally, any story chosen should typify the larger pattern it is being used to represent.

For nearly all of us, what we experience directly carries more weight than what we experience at second or third hand. Therefore, journalists, politicians, and others who want to capture our attention try to draw analogies between what we know directly and the positions they are trying to get us to support.

One story, of the shyster “welfare queen,” was instrumental during the 1990’s in helping push through welfare reforms that limited eligibility and instituted additional work requirements for those receiving government assistance. Since nearly all of us know someone who at one time or another has “gamed the system” to obtain an otherwise undeserved benefit, we could relate.

A different story that got extended currency in the run-up to passage of the Affordable Care Act was the story of Barack Obama’s terminally ill mother having to deal with health insurance procedures while her own health was severely compromised. It was a compelling story that any of us who’ve ever lost a loved one to cancer or some other horrible disease can also relate to.

Were either of these stories representative of the larger issues they tried to address? Perhaps not. In order to determine the size or the generality of each story, we’d have had to wade through studies and statistics of the incidence and prevalence of welfare cheats or of terminally ill patients and their families dealing with health insurance claims. Sometimes such studies exist. At other times they either do not exist or are difficult to access.

To counter our size and generalization instincts, therefore, we usually need access to reliable data. We also need to vary our media sources to get differing perspectives. We need to seek out and discuss viewpoints with those whose life experiences are different from our own. From the Roslings’ perspective, it can help to travel widely, actually living for extended periods in a culture different from our “home” culture. We need to test our assumptions, especially about presumed uniformity among people we expect to be different from us but similar to each other.

We need stories, and we need statistics. Otherwise, our mental rooms tend to stay filled with sometimes comforting but ultimately damaging elephants.

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Posted in Quandaries and Rants, Uncategorized

Tagged ACA, Factfulness, generalization, health insurance, living abroad, patterns, Rosling, size instinct, welfare queen, welfare reform

Nothing Is Coming Up Roses: the Negativity Instinct

Posted on November 13, 2025 | Leave a comment

From time to time, people have compared me to the gloomy character “Eeyore” from the children’s Winnie the Pooh series, or to the character Joe Btfsplk in the L’il Abner comic strip—a guy who constantly has a black cloud over his head. I’m not uniformly gloomy, and it’s not as if I intend to be morose, but I seem to have a penchant for worrying about all the possible ways a situation may turn out wrong. A long-term friend has a more measured description: I’m a “contingency planner.”

As part of the lead-in to its chapter about the negativity instinct, Roslings’ book Factfulness shows a chart with the results of a survey done in 30 countries with a single three-option question: “Do you think the world is getting better, staying the same, or getting worse?”

In all 30 of the countries surveyed, the majority of respondents said the world was getting worse. (Not everyone in any country did, though—there are at least some incurable optimists out there.) Results ranged from nearly 90% who answered “worse” in Turkey to between 50 and 60% in Russia, with other countries, including the U.S., arrayed fairly evenly in between.

The Roslings go on to show sets of global statistics that nearly all point to considerable improvement in many areas of life over the past 200 years: extreme poverty has declined precipitously, life expectancy has more than doubled, health and wealth in most countries have improved greatly. We tend to overemphasize the negative because it is “dramatic.” Good weather, good deeds, good fortune can get taken for granted. We’re more likely to pay attention when something goes wrong.

So what can we do to counteract the negativity instinct?

Hans Rosling’s response is to use a “both/and” approach. As he meditates on the issue, he decides: “The [or ‘a’] solution is not to balance out all the negative news with more positive news. That would just risk creating a self-deceiving, comforting, misleading bias in the other direction. It would be as helpful as balancing too much sugar with too much salt. … I am saying that things can be both bad and better. … Does saying ‘things are improving’ imply that everything is fine, and we should all relax and not worry? No, not at all. Is it helpful to have to choose between bad and improving? Definitely not. It’s both. It’s both bad and better.”

So, the next time someone accuses you of being unnecessarily negative, remind yourself that contingency planning can be valuable. Most aspects of life are a combination of “bad” and “better.” Then take that next breath and figure out what you may be able to do to improve some small part of what strikes you as bad.

Minding the Voting “Gap”

Posted on November 11, 2025 | Leave a comment

As Hans Rosling traveled and matured, he began to understand that many phenomena we regard as impossible are manageable, given a set of gradually developed knowledge and skills. Throughout the rest of his work life, he tried to develop further his openness to manageable progress, along with further knowledge and skills. Rosling spent much of his career as a health researcher in a variety of countries in sub-Saharan Africa and in Asia. During his travels he saw over time how some areas had improved substantially in the goods and services people had access to. When he later returned to his home country of Sweden and taught local medical students, he realized that many of his students had an outmoded view of the world—thinking it consisted only of “rich” countries and “poor” ones.

During the latter part of his career, Hans made it part of his life’s work to get people to take a more nuanced, changeable view of the range of global incomes and living conditions. The Roslings characterize the tendency we all have to simplify lots of different aspects of life (rich/poor, big family/small family, limited education/full education) as binary, with no in-between stages, focussing solely or primarily on the extremes. They call this the “gap” instinct.

It took Hans Rosling most of two decades to help persuade the World Bank to group nations into multiple income levels, rather than just characterizing countries as either “developed,” or “developing.” He theorizes that maybe changing the misconception of an unbridgeable gap between rich and poor countries was so hard because, “…human beings have a strong dramatic instinct toward binary thinking, a basic urge to divide things into two distinct groups, with nothing but an empty gap in between.”

If you’ve followed some of my previous blog efforts, you’re likely aware that I am very wary of the “red state/blue state” gap, among other attempts to depict the American electorate as two extremes with little or nothing in between. Our politicians and our media do us a disservice when they characterize our beliefs or voting patterns that way. Even more damaging and dangerous is the tendency to characterize anyone with a set of beliefs or a voting pattern different from ours as somehow misguided or, even worse, evil.

I don’t know how to counter this particular American “gap” tendency entirely—after all, our country has had the same two major political parties for about 150 years (though what each party emphasizes or claims to believe has changed over time). To some extent, we all need to “clump” individuals into groups, especially when we are talking about large populations. There are over 8 billion humans currently alive, so the effort to see each human individual “whole” is beyond even the most sophisticated analysis. However, we can resist the tendency to reduce every issue, every grouping, to just a binary choice.

Some other countries already practice one small step in the direction of more nuanced voting patterns: as of 2014, the CIA World Fact Book listed 22 countries with a total population of nearly 750 million where voting is required of citizens over the age of 18. Most widely known among these is Australia, where, if you fail to participate in an election, you will be liable for a small fine. Brazil, with over 200 million people, also requires voting, as do Costa Rica, Greece, Mexico, and Thailand, among others. Practicing democracy requires constructive engagement, and voting, made as convenient and easy as practical, is one measure of that engagement. Requiring everyone to vote doesn’t guarantee a 100% turnout, but it is something of an incentive. It can help reduce electoral polarization, especially in primary or off-year elections when U.S. turnout has often been weak, with mostly the more extreme partisans at either end of the political spectrum bothering to show up at the polls.

Other voting practices that can reduce either/or thinking may involve such things as multi-member districts, rank choice voting (sometimes called “instant run-offs”), non-partisan primaries, open primaries (allowing votes for candidates of other parties than the one you are registered in), ballot initiatives and referenda, and independent redistricting commissions. None are perfect tools. In the U.S., few have been tried at the national level. Multiple localities and states have experimented with a variety of these measures. Emphasizing local voting and local elections may be a partial antidote to our current fixation with officials at the national level. Further experimentation might help reduce partisan wrangling and government gridlock.

While the “gap” instinct in characterizing voters and voting patterns may provide a way station in our journey toward more complete understanding, it’s a very fruitless place to get stuck.

Ten November Notions

Posted on November 4, 2025 | Leave a comment

In an earlier blog post, I mentioned a 2018 book I often refer to: Hans Rosling and family’s study of global conditions Factfulness.

We’re in the early days of “National Novel Writing November.” While any novel I may have inside me has yet to agitate for birth, I would like to make the effort to write somewhat more frequently during this month when writers of all genres are encouraged to put pen to paper (or hands to keyboards).

The Roslings published their book, subtitled “Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think,” before the Covid-19 pandemic and before some of our current political dysfunction in the U.S. and elsewhere. I believe that their “ten reasons,” also called “instincts,” are still relevant, perhaps even more so now than when they wrote. (Their non-profit information foundation, Sweden-based gapminder.org, subtitled “important stuff most people get wrong,” makes frequent updates to the information they study.) I plan to explore some of the ten, not necessarily in order, this month–a less daunting effort than writing a novel.

As an introduction, I’ve photocopied the page near the end of their book that lists their ten reasons, providing a catchy graphic for each one. In the text of the book, the Roslings mesh statistics with personal stories from Hans’ life. One early experience, his near-death from drowning as a 4-year-old, helped form Hans’ world view, as did successive brushes with mortality as he pursued a career as a global health researcher with a concentration on sub-Saharan Africa.

My interpretations of the ten reasons are somewhat different from Hans’, based on my own life experiences and opinions. Your interpretations will likely be different from mine. Still, I hope that by focussing on various “instincts” in turn, we may all wind up with slightly different perspectives on the opportunities of the present moment, as well as its dangers. Sharpen your pencils and join in?…