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

Terrorism
If there’s one group of people who have fully understood the power of the
fear instinct, it’s not journalists. It’s terrorists. The clue is in their name. Fear
is what they aim for. And they succeed by tapping into all our primitive fears
—of physical harm, of being trapped, of being poisoned or contaminated.
Terrorism is one of the exceptions to the global trends discussed in
chapter 2 on negativity. It is getting worse. So are you right to be very scared
of it? Well, first of all it accounted for 0.05 percent of all deaths in the world
in 2016, so probably not. Second, it depends where you live.
At the University of Maryland in the United States, a group of researchers
has collected data about all terror events recorded in reliable media since
1970. The result is the freely available Global Terrorism Database, containing
details of 170,000 terror events. This database shows that in the ten-year
period from 2007 to 2016, terrorists killed 159,000 people worldwide: three
times more than the number killed in the previous ten-year period. Just like
with Ebola, when a number is doubling or tripling, of course we should be
worried and look closer to see what it means.
Hunting Terrorism Data

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In this part of the book, all the trends finish in 2016 because 2016 is the last year of data in the
Global Terrorism Database. The researchers carefully study multiple sources to eliminate rumors
and false information for each record they enter, which creates a time delay. That is good scientific
practice, but I find it strange. Just like with Ebola, and as with the CO emissions I will discuss
later, when something seems important and concerning, don’t we need up-to-date data as quickly
as possible rather than perfect data? Otherwise how can we know whether terrorism is increasing
or not?
Wikipedia contains articles with long lists of recent terror attacks from all over the world.
Volunteers update them amazingly quickly, just minutes after the first news is out. I love
Wikipedia and if we could trust these lists, we wouldn’t have to wait so long to see the trend. To
check their reliability we decided to compare (English) Wikipedia with the Global Terrorism
Database for 2015. If the overlap was close to 100 percent, we could probably trust Wikipedia to
be quite complete for 2016 and 2017 as well, and use it as a good-enough source for tracking more
up-to-date terrorism trends.
It turned out Wikipedia unintentionally presented a very distorted worldview. It was distorted in
a systematic way according to a Western mind-set. Our disappointment was huge. More precisely,
it was 78 percent. That’s how many of the 2015 terrorism deaths were missing from Wikipedia.
While almost all the deaths in the West were recorded, only 25 percent of those in “the rest” were
there.
No matter how much I love Wikipedia, we still need serious researchers to maintain reliable
data sets. But they need more resources so they can update them quicker.
2

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However, while terrorism has been increasing worldwide, it has actually
been decreasing on Level 4. In 2007 to 2016 a total of 1,439 people were
killed by terrorists in countries on Level 4. During the ten years before that,
4,358 were killed. That includes the largest attack ever, the 2,996 people who
died on 9/11 in 2001. Even if we exclude them, the death toll on Level 4 has
remained the same between the two latest ten-year periods. It was on Levels
1, 2, and 3 that there was a terrible increase in terror-related deaths. Most of
that increase was in five countries: Iraq (which accounted for almost half the
increase), Afghanistan, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Syria.
Terrorism deaths in the richest countries—i.e., countries on Level 4—
accounted for 0.9 percent of all terrorism deaths in 2007 to 2016. They have

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been decreasing through this century. Since 2001, no terrorist has managed to
kill a single individual by hijacking a commercial airline. In fact, it is hard to
think of a cause of death that kills fewer people in countries on Level 4 than
terrorism. On US soil, 3,172 people died from terrorism over the last 20 years
—an average of 159 a year. During those same years, alcohol contributed to
the death of 1.4 million people in the United States—an average of 69,000 a
year. This is not quite a fair comparison, because in most of those cases the
drinker is also the victim. It would be fairer to look only at those deaths where
the victim was not the drinker: car accidents and homicide. A very
conservative estimate would give us a US figure of roughly 7,500 deaths a
year. In the United States, the risk that your loved one will be killed by a
drunk person is nearly 50 times higher than the risk he or she will be killed by
a terrorist.
But dramatic terrorist incidents in countries on Level 4 receive widespread
media coverage that is denied to most victims of alcohol. And the very visible
security controls at airports, which make the risk lower than ever, might give
an impression of increased danger.
One week after September 11, 2001, according to Gallup, 51 percent of the
US public felt worried that a family member would become a victim of
terrorism. Fourteen years later, the figure was the same: 51 percent. People
are almost as scared today as they were the week after the Twin Towers came
down.