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

Don’t Censor History
When we hang on to a rose-tinted version of history we deprive ourselves and
our children of the truth. The evidence about the terrible past is scary, but it is
a great resource. It can help us to appreciate what we have today and provide
us with hope that future generations will, as previous generations did, get over
the dips and continue the long-term trends toward peace, prosperity, and
solutions to our global problems.
I Would Like to Thank … Society
Struggling for breath in that ditch full of pee 65 years ago in a working-class
suburb in Sweden, little did I know that I would be the first in my family to
go to university. Little did I know that I would become a global health
professor and travel to Davos and tell the world’s experts that they knew less
about basic global trends than chimpanzees.
I didn’t know any basic global trends myself back then, of course. I had to
learn them. The only way anyone can know about different causes of death
and how they are changing, for example, is to keep track of every death and
its cause, write them down, and then add them up. That’s extremely time-
consuming. There’s only one such data set in the whole world. It’s named the
Global Burden of Disease, and when I consulted it many years later it showed
me that my near-death experience was not so special. It was a common type
of accident for a child under five living on Level 3.
All I knew was that I was stuck. My grandmother came to the rescue and
lifted me up. And then Swedish society lifted me further.
During my lifetime, Sweden moved from Level 3 to Level 4. A treatment
against tuberculosis was invented and my mother got well. She read books to
me that she borrowed from the public library. For free. I became the first in
my family to get more than six years of education, and I went to university for
free. I got a doctor’s degree for free. Of course nothing is free: the taxpayers
paid. And then, at the age of 30, when I had become a father of two and I
discovered my first cancer, I was treated and cured by the world’s best health-
care system, for free. My survival and success in life have always depended
on others. Thanks to my family, free education, and free health care, I made it
all the way from that ditch to the World Economic Forum. I would never have
made it on my own.

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Today, now that Sweden is on Level 4, only three children in 1,000 die
before the age of five, and only 1 percent of those deaths are drownings.
Fences, day care, life-jacket campaigns, swimming lessons, and lifeguards at
public pools all cost money. Child death from drowning is one of the many
horrors that has nearly disappeared as the country has become richer. That is
what I call progress. The same improvements are taking place across the
world today. Most countries are currently improving faster than Sweden ever
did. Much faster.