Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think Read Online Free PDF Page A

“divided” worldview is 20 years older, 20 years more outdated. We’re live on air, and the journalist tilts his head and says to me, “We still see an enormous difference between the small, rich world, the old Western world mostly, and then the large part.”
    “But you’re totally wrong,” I reply.
    Once more I explain that “poor developing countries” no longer exist as a distinct group. That there is no gap. Today, most people, 75 percent, live in middle-income countries. Not poor, not rich, but somewhere in the middle and starting to live a reasonable life. At one end of the scale there are still countries with a majority living in extreme and unacceptable poverty; at the other is the wealthy world (of North America and Europe and a few others like Japan, South Korea, and Singapore). But the vast majority are already in the middle.
    “And what do you base that knowledge on?” continued the journalist in an obvious attempt to be provocative. And he succeeded. I couldn’t help getting irritated and my agitation showed in my voice, and my words: “I use normal statistics that are compiled by the World Bank and the United Nations. This is not controversial. These facts are not up for discussion. I am right and you are wrong.”
Capturing the Beast
    Now that I have been fighting the misconception of a divided world for 20 years, I am no longer surprised when I encounter it. My students were not special. The Danish journalist was not special. The vast majority of the people I meet think like this. If you are skeptical about my claim that so many people get it wrong, that’s good. You should always require evidence for claims like these. And here it is, in the form of a two-part misconception trap.
    First, we had people disclose how they imagined life in so-called low-income countries, by asking questions like this one from the test you did in the introduction.
    FACT QUESTION 1
    In all low-income countries across the world today, how many girls finish primary school?
    A: 20 percent
    B: 40 percent
    C: 60 percent
    On average just 7 percent picked the correct answer, C: 60 percent of girls finish primary school in low-income countries. (Remember, 33 percent of the chimps at the zoo would have gotten this question right.) A majority of people “guessed” that it was just 20 percent. There are only a very few countries in the world—exceptional places like Afghanistan or South Sudan—where fewer than 20 percent of girls finish primary school, and at most 2 percent of the world’s girls live in such countries.
    When we asked similar questions about life expectancy, undernourishment, water quality, and vaccination rates—essentially asking what proportion of people in low-income countries had access to the basic first steps toward a modern life—we got the same kinds of results. Life expectancy in low-income countries is 62 years. Most people have enough to eat, most people have access to improved water, most children are vaccinated, and most girls finish primary school. Only tiny percentages—way less than the chimps’ 33 percent—got these answers right, and large majorities picked the worst alternative we offered, even when those numbers represented levels of misery now being suffered only during terrible catastrophes in the very worst places on Earth.

    Now let’s close the trap, and capture the misconception. We now know that people believe that life in low-income countries is much worse than it actually is. But how many people do they imagine live such terrible lives? We asked people in Sweden and the United States:
    Of the world population, what percentage lives in low-income countries?
    The majority suggested the answer was 50 percent or more. The average guess was 59 percent.
    The real figure is 9 percent. Only 9 percent of the world lives in low-income countries. And remember, we just worked out that those countries are not nearly as terrible as people think. They are really bad