Tag Archives: Rosling

Why Ten Instincts? (What May Roslings Have Left Out?) and Why Now?

Posted on November 30, 2025 | Leave a comment

As November draws to a close, I’m winding down my extended discussion of the book Factfulness and its possible relevance to current American and global situations. The book’s themes are likely to pop up occasionally in future blog posts, but never at the level of this month’s concentration. 

I’m not sure why the authors chose ten as the number of “instincts” they wanted us to watch out for. Lots of advice and self-help books have numbers in their titles—for examples, Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Arrien’s The Fourfold Way, Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life—but most categories overlap in actual situations. Perhaps ten is a handy number, a little beyond our typical ability to retain all at one time, but the number of fingers or toes most folks have, the base number system used in most commercial enterprises around the world. 

As I read and reread the various Factfulness chapters, I sometimes wished that the authors leaned somewhat less heavily on the distortions created by our instinctual tendencies. In their books, TED presentations, and gapminder website, the overwhelming number of examples they give are ones in which humans can be outperformed by “chimps,” Roslings’ stand-ins for totally random answers. (Given three possible answers, random responses would be right about 33 percent of the time.) Other recent psychological and sociological studies have highlighted some of the ways our earlier, partly “built in” ways of looking at the world do not fit modernity well. The one question on which most of Roslings’ respondents outperform “chimps” is the likelihood of continuing global temperature increases due to current high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Maybe the Roslings could have included just one or two other areas in which we humans are not worse than random in matching our perceptions to reality? 

Since Factfulness came out, nearly a decade ago, I believe its relevance has only increased. The U.S. (and other “developed” economies) continues to grapple with multiple challenges. The Roslings, with their extensive long-term experience of the “developing” world, have done us a substantial service by focusing there, puncturing many preconceptions about the limited potential of Asian, African, and Latin American peoples (the so-called “global south”). Many in these societies are poised for continuing economic and cultural advancement. Near its conclusion, the book delineates five substantial global risks facing us in the 21st century: pandemics, financial collapse, world war, climate change, and extreme poverty. According to the authors, “…each has the potential to cause mass suffering either directly or indirectly by pausing human progress for many years or decades.” Any of these dwarf the overblown sense of risk many of us get exercised about in our instinctual responses.

What I liked best about the book was its concluding example—an illiterate peasant woman in what was then rural Zaire who may have saved Hans Rosling’s life with her insightful, impassioned speech and action incorporating appropriate responses to multiple misleading instinctual reactions:  

“I was in a remote and extremely poor village, … part of a team investigating an epidemic of the incurable paralytic disease called konzo. … The research project … had been meticulously prepared. But I had made one serious mistake. I had not explained properly to the villagers what I wanted to do and why. … (I)t was only when I switched off [some needed, noisy equipment] that I heard the raised voices. … Then I saw: a crowd of maybe 50 people, all upset and angry.  … I started to explain.  … One man with a machete started screaming again. … Then a barefoot woman, perhaps 50 years old, stepped out of the crowd. …

[She drew analogies to previous measles research that resulted in vaccines to eliminate this dangerous childhood disease. She mentioned her grandchild, stricken with gonzo, suggesting that medical research might lead to breakthroughs against future additional cases.] 

[Then] she turned her back on the crowd, pointed with her other hand to the crook of her arm, and looked me in the eyes. ‘Here. Doctor. Take my blood.’

I am amazed at how well [Factfulness] describes her [counter-instinctual] behavior. She seemed to recognize all the dramatic instincts that had been triggered in that mob [angry at Rosling’s inadequately explained attempt to draw their blood for research into a nutritional disease]. The fear instinct had been triggered by the sharp needles, the blood, and the disease. The generalization instinct had put me in a box as a plundering European. The blame instinct made the villagers take a stand against the evil doctor who had come to steal their blood. The urgency instinct made people make up their minds way too fast. 

Still, under this pressure, she had stood up and spoken out [with both emotion and examples that resonated with her fellow villagers]. … (S)he had courage. And she was able to think critically and express herself with razor-sharp logic and perfect rhetoric at a moment of extreme tension. …” 

In too much of the media exposure I get, in too many of my own reactions, I find evidence of “instinctual” responses and behaviors that can and sometimes do endanger the viability of our human enterprise. Remembering “factfulness” helps pull me back closer to reality.  

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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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Everything Looks Like a Nail: the Single Solution Instinct

Posted on November 25, 2025 | Leave a comment

A decreasing number of us now alive were born during the 1930’s and 1940’s. Depending on our ancestry and the teaching practices of our high schools and/or colleges, we may have experienced or been taught about the Holocaust as a part of the history of that period. Starting in 1933, officials of the Third Reich in Germany had enacted increasingly repressive measures against Jews, eventually resorting to mass murder as a “final solution” to a perceived threat from Jewish participation in European cultures and economies.   

Well over six million civilians, mostly Jews but also some other “deviants” such as labor organizers, freethinkers, Romani people (“gypsies”), homosexuals, or people with physical or mental challenges, died or were killed in various parts of Europe during the period 1939-1945. Many of the deaths occurred in concentration camps, some of which were expressly designed to streamline the extermination process. Where I lived and studied, some survivors had had direct experience of these camps.

I had difficulty grasping the sheer enormity of such an undertaking. The use of the label “final solution” for this horror, though, has ever since made me leery of any attempt to portray any given policy or procedure as “the solution.”  

One example the Roslings give in their book Factfulness is less deliberately destructive: extremes of “free marketism” as an organizing principal for society on one hand, or “equalityism” on the other: 

“For example, the simple and beautiful idea of the free market can lead to the simplistic idea that all problems have a single cause—government interference—which we must always oppose; and that the solution to all problems is to liberate market forces by reducing taxes and removing regulations, which we must always support.

Alternatively, the simple and beautiful idea of equality can lead to the simplistic idea that all problems are caused by inequality, which we should always oppose; and that the solution to all problems is redistribution of resources, which we should always support.”  

Suggesting a more nuanced approach, the Roslings advocate taking much of “received wisdom” with multiple grains of salt, including fairly often questioning our own assumptions or expertise. 

Hans Rosling gives multiple examples from the health care field, his area of greatest concentration. He is not a great fan of the U.S. health care system as currently constituted, but cautions: “I can understand why people looking at the United States and its inequalities and health-care outcomes would decide that private markets and competition should never be allowed anywhere near the delivery of public goods. … [However], (t)he challenge is to find the right balance between regulation and freedom.”  

In a book threaded through with charts and statistics, the Roslings conclude the body of their chapter on single perspectives this way: “The world cannot be understood without numbers, nor through numbers alone. A country cannot function without a government, but the government cannot solve every problem. … No single measure of a good society can drive every other. … It’s not either/or. It’s both and it’s case-by-case.” 

Among their “factfulness prescriptions” to counter the single perspective instinct: “Remember that no one tool is good for everything. If your favorite tool is a hammer, look for colleagues with screwdrivers, wrenches, and tape measures. Be open to ideas from other fields.”  Amen.  

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Up, Up, and Up: the Straight Line Instinct

Posted on November 24, 2025 | Leave a comment

My father-in-law was something of a cut-up. When he finished high school during the early 1920’s, he wasn’t the star scholar of his class, but he was good at telling a story. His classmates demanded that he be chosen to give the graduation address.  

From a few pictures of the time, I can see in my mind’s eye his slicked back hair with the cowlick that refused to lie down, the somewhat unevenly polished shoes his mother had persuaded him to wear with his best suit. His title was “The Iron Bedstead Menace.” 

He never shared the text of his remarks with us, but I can also picture his well-timed delivery, alternately amusing and frightening his audience. He had learned from a magazine article somewhere that the prevalence of iron bedsteads was widespread and continued to grow. 

Grandpa Batterson presented ample evidence of the rapid ascendancy of iron bedstead production and ownership. He projected the continuing growth of the trend, until the Chicago suburb where he and his family lived would be overwhelmed with bedsteads everywhere. These bulky, never-decaying items would over time leave little room for other furniture; discards would fill area dumps and backyards to overflowing. People should beware and take action to ban this creeping menace, before it was too late, he concluded. 

Per a contemporary article on a Home/Office/Garden website: “Owning an iron bed became a status symbol in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As they were more expensive than the basic wooden beds, having an ornately designed iron bed indicated a family’s wealth and modernity. The intricate designs also reflected the artistic tastes and sophistication of the household. (https://hogfurniture.co/blogs/ideas-inspiration/the-importance-of-antique-iron-beds-historically-and-currently, accessed 11/22/2025)” (In hindsight, we’ve learned that the incidence of such beds actually declined as the 1920’s progressed, their overly ornate designs supplanted by more modest furniture.)

The Roslings use global human population growth as evidence of the straight line fallacy—over the centuries, pundits have repeatedly suggested that human population will continue to increase until limited by our finite planet. In its most recent incarnation, the expectation that population will continue its recent upward trajectory fooled lots of sustainability experts at conferences Rosling attended. As Rosling explains: “The number of future children is the most essential number for making global population forecasts. … The numbers [of children globally] are freely available online, from the U.N. website, but free access to data doesn’t turn into knowledge without effort. … U.N. experts expect that in the year 2100 there will be 2 billion children, the same number as today. … [Because] (a)fter 1965 the number [of babies per woman globally] started dropping like it never had done before. Over the last 50 years it dropped all the way to the amazingly low average of just below 2.5.” 

It’s natural for us to expect a certain stability in rates of change of a given phenomenon, but, as the Roslings point out, such stability is not universal. Straight line increases are no more  common than s-bends, slides, bumps, or doubling lines. We need to pay attention to the assumptions we are making about the shape of a line or curve, and adjust our expectations as conditions change. 

(Last time I checked, the Chicago area was not drowning in iron bedsteads.) 

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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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Let’s Beat Up Grandma: The Blame Instinct

Posted on November 19, 2025 | Leave a comment

I really like the way the Rosling book Factfulness leans into our tendency to want to assign blame whenever anything goes wrong. Hans Rosling tells the story this way: 

“I was lecturing at Karolinska Institute [a Swedish medical university], explaining that the big pharmaceutical companies do hardly any research on malaria and nothing at all on sleeping sickness or other illnesses that affect only the poorest. 

A student sitting at the front said, ‘Let’s punch them in the face.’”

(A lengthy chain of “blame” ensued, arriving finally at the many retirees whose investments in pharmaceutical companies help them maintain a stable retirement income because the price of pharmaceutical stocks has tended not to fluctuate as much as most other stocks, and their dividends are fairly well assured.) So, Rosling concluded: 

“…This weekend, go visit your grandma and punch her in the face. If you feel you need someone to blame and punish, it’s the seniors and their greedy need for stable stocks.” 

The desire to find someone or something to blame when events don’t go as we’d like is probably universal. For those of us brought up on Bible stories, it all started in the Garden of Eden, with Adam, Eve, and the snake—Adam blaming Eve, Eve blaming the snake (and God not accepting any of their blame or excuses.) 

The problem with blame is that blame does little or nothing to resolve a problem. Many of us have heard the axiom that in order to point your finger in blame at someone else, you must retract your other fingers, in essence pointing them at yourself. Neither blaming others nor blaming ourselves does anyone much good. 

Many years ago, a tale widely shared in the business community was the “three envelopes story”: placed in a difficult management role, the new manager inherits from his predecessor three sealed envelopes with time-tested advice, to be opened and used sequentially and sparingly, only in cases of extreme need:

1) blame your predecessor
2) reorganize
3) prepare three envelopes

Very rarely is there a single person or factor who deserves either blame or credit for a particular outcome. More often, there are sets of interlocking factors in a complex system, making it quite difficult to determine which factor(s) can be adjusted to produce a better outcome. 

Roslings’ prescriptions: Look for causes, not villains; look for systems, not heroes. 

It’s easier to fall into the trap of using blame when we divorce ourselves from the natural world. That’s one reason a short Robert Frost poem, “Something Like a Star,” with an imaginary conversation with a reclusive star, helps reground me against blaming:  

…Some mystery becomes the proud.
But to be wholly taciturn
In your reserve is not allowed. …


And steadfast as Keats’ Eremite
Not even stooping from its sphere,
It asks a little of us here.
It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.

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The “Fear” Instinct: Danger versus Fright

Posted on November 11, 2025 | Leave a comment

One of the most insidious “instincts” we retain from earlier periods of human existence is the fear instinct, when misapplied. Some fears are justified. Many are not, or are blown out of proportion.

Like Hans Rosling, author of Factfulness, I grew up during the 1950’s and 1960’s Cold War era, back when we did “civil defense” drills for protecting ourselves in the event of a nuclear attack (spoiler alert—hiding under your elementary school desk with your hands interlaced above your head would be pretty useless against nuclear blasts or fallout). 

My nightmares back then involved not being able to find family members in time for all of us to hide in our house’s basement, the one area that might provide some minimal protection against the effects of nuclear blasts and radiation. As our societies continue to learn to deal with nuclear threats, my fear level about nuclear attack ebbs and flows.  

My fear of snakes has likewise ebbed and flowed. Much of my life has been spent where snake bites are rare and even more rarely lethal. However, during my one extended stay in an African country, where black or green mambas could inject a quickly lethal venom and sometimes were fairly well camouflaged, fear of snakes may have helped keep me alive.

Back then, I had part-time access to an aging Volkswagen beetle with a rust hole near its gas pedal. I used it to commute to the offices of an international development project I was a temporary part of. One afternoon, as I drove back to the office after a lunch break, I noticed a large black snake sidling across the road in front of me. Had it been still, I might not have registered its presence. As it was, I slammed on the brakes and pulled to the side of the road a good distance uphill from the snake. The little car I was driving might have been heavy enough to crush the snake, but I decided it would be risky to drive over it. The hole in the bottom of the car was too near my foot. Instead, I waited. Not long afterward, a heavy luxury vehicle driven by the head of the local branch of the World Bank came barreling down the hill. After the Mercedes drove over it, the snake was thoroughly crushed and dead. I proceeded, more careful thereafter to distinguish between road tar and road snakes.  

Rosling tells a story of how, when he was just starting out as a physician, his irrational fear of nuclear war badly distorted his initial reaction to an incoherent Swedish pilot with hypothermia. Afterwards, Rosling’s longish life of dealing in some fearful situations led him to a more skeptical view of most fears: “Fears that once helped keep our ancestors alive, today help keep journalists employed.” Rosling asserts, “If we look at the facts behind the headlines, we can see how the fear instinct systematically distorts what we see of the world.”  

Today is Veterans’ Day, when we honor those living and dead who have sometimes put themselves in harm’s way to help keep the rest of us safer. They get sent where most of us would fear to go. During the waning days of World War II, my Dad was stationed with the Navy in the South Pacific. He never made a fuss about being a veteran. The war he was part of did horrendous damage, but may have indirectly played a small part in reducing our fears of “others.” As some lyrics from the 1949 musical “South Pacific” taunted: “You’ve got to be taught to be afraid of people whose eyes are oddly made, and people whose skin is a different shade, you’ve got to be carefully taught…” Some of those of different shades who’d served during World War II eventually became leaders in the Civil Rights movements, including Medgar Evers and Ralph Abernathy.

Not having served in the military, I cannot speak directly to the level of fear generated by deployment in dangerous areas or by actual combat. I am deeply indebted to those whose willingness to take risks on my behalf has made my life safer. However, I suspect that military planners and leaders have sometimes put both soldiers and civilians in harm’s way unnecessarily.

Rosling concludes, “Fear can be useful, but only if it is directed at the right things. … ‘Frightening’ and ‘dangerous’ are two different things. Something frightening poses a perceived risk. Something dangerous poses a real risk. Paying too much attention to what is frightening rather than what is dangerous … creates a tragic drainage of energy in the wrong directions.” May we all, especially our military’s leaders, get better at distinguishing fright from danger.

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Newsworthy?

Posted on March 15, 2025 | Leave a comment

The news seems to come at us faster and faster these days. With so many channels and so many media, it can be hard to keep track. Hard, too, to keep away from the insistent, worrisome chatter. Might our job/investment portfolio/health care/retirement income go up in smoke if we don’t pay close enough attention? Might the next global conflict be just around the corner? Might the U.S. devolve into its next civil war during the current congressional or presidential term? Will we ever get to civil peace again?

Most mental health advice suggests that limiting our news consumption helps maintain our sanity. When we pay too much attention, we can easily succumb to the belief that everything is out of control, that things are bad and getting worse. 

It helps me to take a step back. Being older in this instance can also be an asset. Having endured prior booms, busts, and disasters helps me put things into perspective. 

As a lifelong bookworm, I’ve also developed during the past couple of decades some “go to” volumes for perspective adjustment. Two stand out, both for their global range, and for their hopefulness: 

———–

Half the Sky, by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, was published in 2009. Its title derives from the Chinese folk proverb, “Women hold up half the sky.” The book focusses on women’s situations in the developing world and how we might achieve women’s development goals globally. Kristof and WuDunn explore some of the gaps and practices that continue to disenfranchise women and girls. The authors stress adequate health care, education, and entrepreneurship as avenues for progress, benefitting both women and men. They present vivid examples, while being realistic about roadblocks. One is our human tendency to focus on individual stories over the “big picture.” For example, in discussing maternal mortality ratios, they touch briefly on overall statistics. Global data on such rates, from 2005, ranged from 1 death per 100,000 live births in Ireland to 2,100 in Sierra Leone. The authors then write: “…[W]e hesitate to pile on the data, since even when numbers are persuasive, they are not galvanizing. …[S]tatistics have a dulling effect, while it is individual stories that move people to act.” (p. 99)  

Factfulness, by Hans Rosling with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund, was published in 2018. The subtitle to the Roslings’ book is attitude adjusting all by itself: “Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think.” Hans Rosling died while the book was in progress and was succeeded in authorship by his son and daughter-in-law. Hans gained wide recognition as a global health researcher who made statistics both more approachable and more relevant. He pioneered representing global datasets with proportionately sized bubbles for different countries or regions. He also showed bubbles in motion for longer term trends. (You may want to watch his TED talk from 2006 on late 20th century human fertility, health, wealth, and change titled “The Best Stats You’ve Ever Seen,” or a 4-minute BBC presentation of “200 years of health and wealth in 200 countries.”)  

In Factfulness, the Roslings sum up Hans’ life’s work by pointing out the harmful “instincts” that can skew our assessments of overall conditions. One that I find especially prevalent in current news is the “size instinct.” As they explain: 

“You tend to get things out of proportion. I do not mean to sound rude. Getting things out of proportion, or misjudging the size of things, is something that we humans do naturally. It is instinctive to look at a lonely number and misjudge its importance. …

The media is this instinct’s friend.  …

The size instinct directs our limited attention and resources toward those individual instances or identifiable victims, those concrete things right in front of our eyes.”  (pp. 128-129)

———-

Much of our current media, it seems to me, suffers greatly from overuse of the  “size instinct.” Though huge numbers can get bandied about without much context, much of our media highlights whichever isolated facts promote their respective political agendas. Our size instinct is not new, but can get amplified in our media-saturated lives. 

Several decades ago, I was exposed to the slogan “Think globally, act locally.” The Kristof/WuDunn and Rosling books remind me to pay attention to widespread, longer term trends, while at the same time concentrating my energies and skills toward making the locale where I live a little bit more humane, a little bit more equitable. Facts are mutable over time. Women do hold up half the sky. And if enough of us make small improvements wherever we are, over time we’ll become worthy of better news.  

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