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

party! And when I say “we,” I mean humanity!
Instead, we are gloomy. On our Level 4 TVs, we still see people in extreme
poverty and it seems that nothing has changed. Billions of people have
escaped misery and become consumers and producers for the world market,
billions of people have managed to slide up from Level 1 to Levels 2 and 3,
without the people on Level 4 noticing.
Life Expectancy
FACT QUESTION 4
What is the life expectancy of the world today?
A: 50 years
B: 60 years
C: 70 years
Showing all the causes of deaths and suffering in one number is nearly
impossible. But the average life expectancy gets very close. Every child
death, every premature death from man-made or natural disasters, every
mother dying in childbirth, and every elderly person’s prolonged life is
reflected in this measure.
Back in 1800, when Swedes starved to death and British children worked in
coal mines, life expectancy was roughly 30 years everywhere in the world.
That was what it had been throughout history. Among all babies who were
ever born, roughly half died during their childhood. Most of the other half
died between the ages of 50 and 70. So the average was around 30. It doesn’t
mean most people lived to be 30. It’s just an average, and with averages we
must always remember that there’s a spread.
The average life expectancy across the world today is 70. Actually, it’s
better than that: it’s 72. Here are the results of some polling.

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This is one of those questions where the better educated you are, the more
ignorant you seem to be. In most countries where we tested, members of the
public just about beat the chimps. (The full country breakdown is in the
appendix.) But in our more highly educated audiences, the most popular
answer was 60 years. That would have been correct if we had asked the
question in 1973 (the year when 200,000 people starved to death in Ethiopia).
But we asked it in this decade, more than 40 years of progress later. People
live on average ten years longer now. We humans have always struggled hard
to make our families survive, and finally we are succeeding.

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When I show this amazing graph, people often ask, “What is the most
recent dip there?,” and they point at 1960. If you don’t know already, this is a
great opportunity for me to attack the misconception that the world is getting
worse.
There’s a dip in the global life expectancy curve in 1960 because 15 to 40
million people—nobody knows the exact number—starved to death that year
in China, in what was probably the world’s largest ever man-made famine.
The Chinese harvest in 1960 was smaller than planned because of a bad
season combined with poor governmental advice about how to grow crops
more effectively. The local governments didn’t want to show bad results, so
they took all the food and sent it to the central government. There was no
food left. One year later the shocked inspectors were delivering eyewitness
reports of cannibalism and dead bodies along roads. The government denied
that its central planning had failed, and the catastrophe was kept secret by the
Chinese government for 36 years. It wasn’t described in English to the outside
world until 1996. (Think about it. Could any government keep the death of 15
million people a global secret today?)
Even if the Chinese government had told the world about this tragedy, the
UN World Food Programme—which today distributes food to wherever it is
most needed in the world—couldn’t have helped. It wasn’t created until 1961.
The misconception that the world is getting worse is very difficult to
maintain when we put the present in its historical context. We shouldn’t
diminish the tragedies of the droughts and famines happening right now. But
knowledge of the tragedies of the past should help everyone realize how the
world has become both much more transparent and much better at getting
help to where it’s needed.