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

The Foreign Disease
The body’s largest organ is the skin. Before modern medicine, one of the worst imaginable skin
diseases was syphilis, which would start as itchy boils and then eat its way into the bones until it
exposed the skeleton. The microbe that caused this disgusting sight and unbearable pain had
different names in different places. In Russia it was called the Polish disease. In Poland it was the
German disease; in Germany, the French disease; and in France, the Italian disease. The Italians
blamed back, calling it the French disease.
The instinct to find a scapegoat is so core to human nature that it’s hard to imagine the Swedish
people calling the open sores the Swedish disease, or the Russians calling it the Russian disease.
That’s not how people work. We need someone to blame and if a single foreigner came here with
the disease, then we would happily blame a whole country. No further investigation needed.
Blame and Claim
The blame instinct drives us to attribute more power and influence to
individuals than they deserve, for bad or good. Political leaders and CEOs in
particular often claim they are more powerful than they are.
Powerful Leaders?
For example, Mao was undoubtedly an extraordinarily powerful figure whose
actions had direct consequences for 1 billion people. But his infamous one-
child policy had less influence on birth rates than is commonly thought.
Most often when I show the low birth numbers in Asia, someone says,
“That must be because of Mao’s one-child policy.” But the huge, fast drop
from six to three babies per woman had happened in the ten years preceding
the one-child policy. And during the 36 years the policy was in place, the
number never fell below 1.5, though it did in many other countries without
enforcement, like Ukraine, Thailand, and South Korea. In Hong Kong, where
again the one-child policy didn’t apply, the number dropped even below one
baby per woman. All this suggests that there were other factors at play here—
the reasons I have already outlined for why women decide to have babies—
than the decisive command of a powerful man.
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The pope is also credited with enormous influence over the sexual behavior
of the 1 billion Catholics in the world. However, despite the clear
condemnation of the use of contraception by several successive popes, the
statistics show that contraceptive use is 60 percent in Catholic-majority
countries, compared with 58 percent in the rest of the world. In other words, it
is the same. The pope is one of the world’s most prominent moral leaders, but
it seems that even leaders with great political power or moral authority do not
have remote controls that can reach into the bedroom.