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

Institutions

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Only in a few countries, with exceptionally destructive leaders and conflicts,
has social and economic development been halted. Everywhere else, even
with the most incapable presidents imaginable, there has been progress. It
must make one ask if the leaders are that important. And the answer,
probably, is no. It’s the people, the many, who build a society.
Sometimes, when I turn the water on to wash my face in the morning and
warm water comes out just like magic, I silently praise those who made it
possible: the plumbers. When I’m in that mode I’m often overwhelmed by the
number of opportunities I have to feel grateful to civil servants, nurses,
teachers, lawyers, police officers, firefighters, electricians, accountants, and
receptionists. These are the people building societies. These are the invisible
people working in a web of related services that make up society’s
institutions. These are the people we should celebrate when things are going
well.
In 2014, I went to Liberia to help fight Ebola because I was afraid that if it
weren’t stopped, it could easily spread to the rest of the world and kill a
billion people, causing more harm than any known pandemic in world history.
The fight against the lethal Ebola virus was won not by an individual heroic
leader, or even by one heroic organization like Médecins Sans Frontières or
UNICEF. It was won prosaically and undramatically by government staff and
local health workers, who created public health campaigns that changed
ancient funeral practices in a matter of days; risked their lives to treat dying
patients; and did the cumbersome, dangerous, and delicate work of finding
and isolating all the people who had been in contact with them. Brave and
patient servants of a functioning society, rarely ever mentioned—but the true
saviors of the world.
Technology
The Industrial Revolution saved billions of lives not because it produced
better leaders but because it produced things like chemical detergents that
could run in automatic washing machines.
I was four years old when I saw my mother load a washing machine for the
first time. It was a great day for my mother; she and my father had been
saving money for years to be able to buy that machine. Grandma, who had
been invited to the inauguration ceremony for the new washing machine, was
even more excited. She had been heating water with firewood and hand-
washing laundry her whole life. Now she was going to watch electricity do
that work. She was so excited that she sat on a chair in front of the machine
for the entire washing cycle, mesmerized. To her the machine was a miracle.

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It was a miracle for my mother and me too. It was a magic machine.
Because that very day my mother said to me, “Now, Hans, we have loaded the
laundry. The machine will do the work. So now we can go to the library.” In
went the laundry, and out came books. Thank you industrialization, thank you
steel mill, thank you power station, thank you chemical-processing industry,
for giving us the time to read books.
Two billion people today have enough money to use a washing machine
and enough time for mothers to read books—because it is almost always the
mothers who do the laundry.