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

Urgent! Read This Now!
Urgency is one of the worst distorters of our worldview. I know I probably
said that about all the other dramatic instincts too, but I think maybe this one
really is special. Or perhaps they all come together in this one. The
overdramatic worldview in people’s heads creates a constant sense of crisis
and stress. The urgent “now or never” feelings it creates lead to stress or
apathy: “We must do something drastic. Let’s not analyze. Let’s do
something.” Or, “It’s all hopeless. There’s nothing we can do. Time to give
up.” Either way, we stop thinking, give in to our instincts, and make bad
decisions.
The Five Global Risks We 
Should
 Worry About
I do not deny that there are pressing global risks we need to address. I am not
an optimist painting the world in pink. I don’t get calm by looking away from
problems. The five that concern me most are the risks of global pandemic,
financial collapse, world war, climate change, and extreme poverty. Why is it
these problems that cause me most concern? Because they are quite likely to
happen: the first three have all happened before and the other two are
happening now; and because each has the potential to cause mass suffering
either directly or indirectly by pausing human progress for many years or
decades. If we fail here, nothing else will work. These are mega killers that
we must avoid, if at all possible, by acting collaboratively and step-by-step.
(There is a sixth candidate for this list. It is the unknown risk. It is the
probability that something we have not yet even thought of will cause terrible
suffering and devastation. That is a sobering thought. While it is truly
pointless worrying about something unknown that we can do nothing about,
we must also stay curious and alert to new risks, so that we can respond to
them.)
Global Pandemic
The Spanish flu that spread across the world in the wake of the First World
War killed 50 million people—more people than the war had, although that
was partly because the populations were already weakened after four years of
war. As a result, global life expectancy fell by ten years, from 33 to 23, as you
can see from the dip in the curve here. Serious experts on infectious diseases

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agree that a new nasty kind of flu is still the most dangerous threat to global
health. The reason: flu’s transmission route. It flies through the air on tiny
droplets. A person can enter a subway car and infect everyone in it without
them touching each other, or even touching the same spot. An airborne
disease like flu, with the ability to spread very fast, constitutes a greater threat
to humanity than diseases like Ebola or HIV/AIDS. Protecting ourselves in
every possible way from a virus that is highly transmissible and ignores every
type of defense is worth the effort, to put it mildly.
The world is more ready to deal with flu than it has been in the past, but
people on Level 1 still live in societies where it can be difficult to intervene
rapidly against an aggressively spreading disease. We need to ensure that
basic health care reaches everyone, everywhere, so that outbreaks can be
discovered more quickly. And we need the World Health Organization to
remain healthy and strong to coordinate a global response.