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

Question Your Categories
It will be helpful to you if you always assume your categories are misleading.
Here are five powerful ways to keep questioning your favorite categories:
look for differences within and similarities across groups; beware of “the
majority”; beware of exceptional examples; assume you are not “normal”;
and beware of generalizing from one group to another.
Look for Differences Within Groups and Similarities Across Groups
Country stereotypes simply fall apart when you look at the huge differences
within countries and the equally huge similarities between countries on the
same income level, independent of culture or religion.
Remember the similarities between the cooking pots of families on Level
2 in Nigeria and China? If you saw just the picture from China you would
probably think, “Oh, that’s how they heat water in China. In an iron pot on a
tripod over a fire. That’s their culture.” No. It is a common way to heat water

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on Level 2, all over the world. It’s a question of income. And in China, as
elsewhere, people also cook in several other ways, depending not on their
“culture” but on their income level.
When someone says that an individual did something because they belong
to some group—a nation, a culture, a religion—take care. Are there examples
of different behavior in the same group? Or of the same behavior in other
groups?
Africa is a huge continent of 54 countries and 1 billion people. In Africa we
find people living at every level of development: in the bubble chart above I
have highlighted all the African countries. Look at Somalia, Ghana, and
Tunisia. It makes no sense to talk about “African countries” and “Africa’s
problems” and yet people do, all the time. It leads to ridiculous outcomes like
Ebola in Liberia and Sierra Leone affecting tourism in Kenya, a 100-hour
drive across the continent. That is farther than London to Tehran.