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

How to Control the Destiny Instinct
How can we help our brains to see that rocks move; that the way things are
now is neither how they have always been nor how they are always meant to
be?
Slow Change Is Not No Change
Societies and cultures are in constant movement. Even changes that seem
small and slow add up over time: 1 percent growth each year seems slow but
it adds up to a doubling in 70 years; 2 percent growth each year means
doubling in 35 years; 3 percent growth each year means doubling in 24 years.
In the third century 
BC
, the world’s first nature reserve was created by King
Devanampiya Tissa in Sri Lanka when he declared a piece of forest to be
officially protected. It took more than 2,000 years for a European, in West
Yorkshire, to get a similar idea, and another 50 years before Yellowstone
National Park was established in the United States. By the year 1900,
0.03 percent of the Earth’s land surface was protected. By 1930 it was
0.2 percent. Slowly, slowly, decade by decade, one forest at a time, the
number climbed. The annual increase was absolutely tiny, almost
imperceptible. Today a stunning 15 percent of the Earth’s surface is protected,
and the number is still climbing.
To control the destiny instinct, don’t confuse slow change with no change.
Don’t dismiss an annual change—even an annual change of only 1 percent—

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because it seems too small and slow.
Be Prepared to Update Your Knowledge
It’s relaxing to think that knowledge has no sell-by date: that once you have
learned something, it stays fresh forever and you never have to learn it again.
In the sciences like math and physics, and in the arts, that is often true. In
those subjects, what we all learned at school (2 + 2 = 4) is probably still good.
But in the social sciences, even the most basic knowledge goes off very
quickly. As with milk or vegetables, you have to keep getting it fresh.
Because everything changes.
I have been caught out by this even in my own work. Thirteen years after I
first asked them, we planned to rerun my very first chimpanzee questions
from 1998 to see whether people’s knowledge had improved. In these
questions, I showed five pairs of countries and asked which country in each
pair had the highest child mortality rate. Back in 1998, my Swedish students
had answered incorrectly because they couldn’t imagine that Asian countries
were better than European countries.
When we pulled the questions up, after only 13 years, we realized that it
was going to be impossible to rerun the test because the correct answers had
changed. Because the world had changed. How illustrative was this? Even
Gapminder’s own fact questions had become outdated.
To control the destiny instinct, stay open to new data and be prepared to
keep freshening up your knowledge.
Talk to Grandpa
If you are tempted to claim that values are unchanging, try comparing your
own with those of your parents, or your grandparents—or your children or
your grandchildren. Try getting hold of public opinion polls for your country
from 30 years ago. You will almost certainly see radical change.