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

Factfulness in Practice
How can you use Factfulness in your everyday life: in education, in business,
in journalism, in your own organization or community, and as an individual
citizen?
Education
In Sweden we don’t have volcanoes, but we have geologists who are paid out
of public funds to study volcanoes. Even regular schoolkids learn about
volcanoes. Here in the Northern Hemisphere, astronomers learn about stars
that can be seen only in the Southern Hemisphere. And at school, children
learn about these stars. Why? Because they are part of the world.
Why then do our doctors and nurses not learn about the disease patterns on
every income level? Why are we not teaching the basic up-to-date
understanding of our changing world in our schools and in corporate
education?
We should be teaching our children the basic up-to-date, fact-based
framework—life on the four levels and in the four regions—and training them
to use Factfulness rules of thumb—the bullet points from the end of each
chapter
.
This would enable them to put the news from around the world in
context and spot when the media, activists, or salespeople are triggering their
dramatic instincts with overdramatic stories. These skills are part of the
critical thinking that is already taught in many schools. They would protect
the next generation from a lot of ignorance.
•
We should be teaching our children that there are countries on all
different levels of health and income and that most are in the middle.
•
We should be teaching them about their own country’s socioeconomic
position in relation to the rest of the world, and how that is changing.
•
We should be teaching them how their own country progressed through
the income levels to get to where it is now, and how to use that
knowledge to understand what life is like in other countries today.

---

•
We should be teaching them that people are moving up the income
levels and most things are improving for them.
•
We should be teaching them what life was really like in the past so that
they do not mistakenly think that no progress has been made.
•
We should be teaching them how to hold the two ideas at the same
time: that bad things are going on in the world, but that many things
are getting better.
•
We should be teaching them that cultural and religious stereotypes are
useless for understanding the world.
•
We should be teaching them how to consume the news and spot the
drama without becoming stressed or hopeless.
•
We should be teaching them the common ways that people will try to
trick them with numbers.
•
We should be teaching them that the world will keep changing and they
will have to update their knowledge and worldview throughout their
lives.
Most important of all, we should be teaching our children humility and
curiosity
.
Being humble, here, means being aware of how difficult your instincts can
make it to get the facts right. It means being realistic about the extent of your
knowledge. It means being happy to say “I don’t know.” It also means, when
you do have an opinion, being prepared to change it when you discover new
facts. It is quite relaxing being humble, because it means you can stop feeling
pressured to have a view about everything, and stop feeling you must be
ready to defend your views all the time.
Being curious means being open to new information and actively seeking it
out. It means embracing facts that don’t fit your worldview and trying to
understand their implications. It means letting your mistakes trigger curiosity
instead of embarrassment. “How on earth could I be so wrong about that fact?
What can I learn from that mistake? Those people are not stupid, so why are
they using that solution?” It is quite exciting being curious, because it means
you are always discovering something interesting.
But the world will keep changing, and the problem of ignorant grown-ups
will not be solved by teaching the next generation. What you learn about the
world at school will become outdated within 10 or 20 years of graduating. So
we must find ways to update adults’ knowledge too. In the car industry, cars
are recalled when a mistake is discovered. You get a letter from the
manufacturer saying, “We would like to recall your vehicle and replace the
brakes.” When the facts about the world that you were taught in schools and

---

universities become out of date, you should get a letter too: “Sorry, what we
taught you is no longer true. Please return your brain for a free upgrade.” Or
perhaps your employer should tackle the problem: “Please go through this
material and take this test, to avoid embarrassing yourself at the World
Economic Forum or similar.”