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

I Was Born in Egypt
My home country of Sweden is today on Level 4 and one of the richest and
healthiest countries in the world. (Saying that a country is on Level 4 means
that the average person in that country is on Level 4. It doesn’t mean that
everyone in Sweden is on Level 4. Remember, averages disguise spreads.)
But it hasn’t always been so.
Now I’m going to show you my favorite graph. There’s a color version of it
on the inside front cover of this book. I call it the World Health Chart and it is
like a world map for health and wealth. As with the bubble graph you saw in
the previous chapter, each country is represented by a bubble, with the size of
the bubble showing the size of the country’s population. As before poorer

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countries are on the left and richer countries are on the right; healthier
countries are higher up, and sicker countries are lower down.
Notice that there are not two groups. The world is not divided into two.
There are countries on all levels, all the way from the sick and poor in the
bottom left corner to the rich and healthy in the top right corner, where
Sweden is. And most countries are in the middle.
Now this next bit is exciting.
The trail of little bubbles shows Sweden’s health and wealth for every year
since 1800. What tremendous progress! I have highlighted some countries
that correspond, in 2017, to important years from Sweden’s past.

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1948 was a very important year. The Second World War was over, Sweden
topped the medals table at the Winter Olympics, and I was born. The Sweden
I was born into in 1948 was where Egypt is on the health-wealth map today.
That is to say, it was right in the middle of Level 3. Life conditions in 1950s
Sweden were similar to those in Egypt or other countries on Level 3 today.
There were still open sewage ditches and it wasn’t uncommon for children to
drown in bodies of water close to home. On Level 3, parents work hard, away

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from their children, and the government has not yet enforced regulations to
protect water with fences.
Sweden kept improving during my lifetime. During the 1950s and 1960s it
progressed all the way from Egypt today to Malaysia today. By 1975, the year
Anna and Ola were born, Sweden, like Malaysia today, was just about to enter
Level 4.
Let’s go backward now. When my mother was born, in 1921, Sweden was
like Zambia is now. That’s Level 2.
My grandmother was the Lesothian member of our family. When she was
born in 1891, Sweden was like Lesotho is today. That’s the country with the
shortest life expectancy in the world today, right on the border between Level
1 and 2, almost in extreme poverty. My grandmother hand-washed all the
laundry for her family of nine all her adult life. But as she grew older, she
witnessed the miracle of development as both she and Sweden reached Level
3. By the end of her life she had an indoor cold-water tap and a latrine bucket
in the basement: luxury compared to her childhood, when there had been no
running water. All four of my grandparents could spell and count, but none of
them was literate enough to read for pleasure. They couldn’t read children’s
books to me, nor could they write a letter. None of them had had more than
four years of school. Sweden in my grandparents’ generation had the same
level of literacy that India, also on Level 2, has achieved today.
My great-grandmother was born in 1863, when Sweden’s average income
level was like today’s Afghanistan, right on Level 1, with a majority of the
population living in extreme poverty. Great-grandmother didn’t forget to tell
her daughter, my grandmother, how cold the mud floor used to be in the
winter. But today people in Afghanistan and other countries on Level 1 live
much longer lives than Swedes did back in 1863. This is because basic
modernizations have reached most people and improved their lives
drastically. They have plastic bags to store and transport food. They have
plastic buckets to carry water and soap to kill germs. Most of their children
are vaccinated. On average they live 30 years longer than Swedes did in 1800,
when Sweden was on Level 1. That is how much life even on Level 1 has
improved.
Your own country has been improving like crazy too. I can say this with
confidence even though I don’t know where you live, because every country
in the world has improved its life expectancy over the last 200 years. In fact
almost every country has improved by almost every measure.