Hans Rosling with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund: Factfulness. Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – And Why Things Are Better Than You Think. London: Sceptre, 2018.
Rosling’s Factfulness popped up in my filter bubble several times and since two topics dear to my heart – ignorance and optimism – surface a lot in his book, I just had to read it with my philosophical glasses on. This isn’t a full review – the book is a nice read and I can certainly recommend it! –, just some comments on what Rosling has to say about ignorance and optimism. In a nutshell, Rosling argues that we (= adults from developed, level 4 countries) are mostly ignorant about the current state of the world, in particular about population growth, poverty, education, gender differences and health. This claim is based on a survey of 12,000 participants from 14 countries in which most participants consistently choose an option that represents the world as worse than it actually is. For example, most participants think that 50% or less of the world’s children are vaccinated against at least one disease – despite the correct answer being 80%. We aren’t just ignorant – we suffer from a pessimistic illusion!
First, ignorance. Interestingly, Rosling contrasts ignorance with factfulness which suggests that ignorance can be characterised as factemptyness or missing the facts. One issue in the philosophical literature on ignorance is whether ignorance is factive: Can you be ignorant that p when p is false? Are we ignorant that, say, New York is the capital of the USA? Of course, Rosling isn’t interested in these conceptual question, but for those who like me argue that ignorance is factive, it’s nice to see that Rosling relies on a conception of ignorance that implicitly endorses its factivity.
But I’m not convinced of Rosling’s interpretation of his data or his methodology for detecting ignorance. I happily admit that I didn’t know that 80% of the world’s children are vaccinated against at least one disease. But that doesn’t mean that I’m an ignoramus about vaccination. (Of course, I might be, but his book doesn’t convince me that I am!) Here is an analogy: I happily admit that I didn’t know (before looking it up) that where I live water hardness is 3 mmol/l. Yet I certainly knew that the water is hard here. I also knew what that means for the washing machine: more washing powder, for my health: nothing, and so on. What matters for ignorance about vaccination rates or water hardness is not knowledge of context-free quantitative factoids. We can’t move from “is ignorant that p” to “is ignorant about topic X“, unless knowing that p is representative or required for having knowledge about X. Rosling’s questions don’t meet this criterion. I don’t think of myself as more educated or more knowledgeable now that I know that 80% of the world’s children are vaccinated against at least one disease. To the contrary, learning this without any explanation of how to interpret it increases my felt ignorance: Which diseases are we talking about? What is the underlying distribution? Where do the completely unvaccinated children live? Why don’t they receive vaccinations?
A different topic is Rosling’s explanation, which may still be right. According to him, we get the answer wrong because we are pessimists: When not knowing the answer, we are biased to assume the worst. Estimating a worldwide average is a difficult task. For a serious guess one must estimate both vaccination rates and numbers of births in various regions of the world – while also remembering that a single vaccination suffices for being counted as vaccinated. Thus, what needs to be explained isn’t that participants get the answer wrong. It isn’t surprising that participants get the answer to a difficult question wrong. That’s where Rosling’s argument comes in: If participants would simply guess the answer, we would expect the answers to be distributed randomly – which they aren’t. A bias towards a pessimistic worldview is postulated to explain this non-randomness.
Although I find Rosling’s hypothesis intriguing, the data is consistent with participants plainly misapplying the information they have due to pragmatic cues in the survey. There is no need to assume that any pessimistic distortion is going on as well. Assume all I know about vaccination rates is that there are media reports on the unavailability of vaccinations somewhere (I have forgotten where) and that some charities (I have forgotten which ones) ask for money to vaccinate more children against some disease (I have forgotten which disease) in some area of the world (again, I have forgotten where). Basically, all I know is that it is morally mandatory to increase vaccination rates. Now I’m confronted with Rosling’s question and the options 20%, 50% and 80%. The numbers don’t mean much to me. “Some”, “more than some, less than enough”, “enough” meant the same to me. Given the little knowledge I have I shy away from extreme answers and 50% looks like a safe bet. Alternatively, since the numbers don’t mean anything to me, I may begin considering 20% to be a serious option just because it is presented as an option. If the options had been 70%, 80% and 90%, I wouldn’t have missed the 20% option. But now that it is there, I wonder whether I can rule out that things are much worse than I thought them be. Maybe I should have read that leaflet I found in the mail last month! – I’m sorry to make this cliché objection (there certainly is nothing original in my little story!), but survey pragmatics raises its ugly head: The non-randomness can be explained by subtle cues in the survey.
These aren’t just academic quibbles. What puzzles me most about the book is how uneducational it is. Rosling is telling us to be more factful, but he isn’t actually showing us how a factful approach actually deals with poverty, health, population growth and so on. Why write a book about factfulness, but not a factful book? I don’t know, but Rosling’s overdramatic, pessimistic view about our knowledge of the world seems to play an important part here.
See part 2 for some comments on optimism.
