News media doom-mongers and misanthropic activists manipulating crises to grab your attention beware. Lone dataslinger, Hans Rosling is in town armed with his trusty fact machine.
The Guardian, published an edited excerpt from Hans Rosling's posthumously published Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong about the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think:
Good news at last: the world isn’t as horrific as you think
"Training yourself how to put the news into perspective – practising ‘factfulness’ – will change your outlook for the better," argues Rosling.
"Things are bad, and it feels like they are getting worse, right? War, violence, natural disasters, corruption. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer; and we will soon run out of resources unless something drastic is done. That’s the picture most people in the west see in the media and carry around in their heads.
I call it the overdramatic worldview. It’s stressful and misleading. In fact, the vast majority of the world’s population live somewhere in the middle of the income scale. Perhaps they are not what we think of as middle class, but they are not living in extreme poverty. Their girls go to school, their children get vaccinated. Perhaps not on every single measure, or every single year, but step by step, year by year, the world is improving. In the past two centuries, life expectancy has more than doubled. Although the world faces huge challenges, we have made tremendous progress."
If it sounds like Steven Pinker territory that's because Pinker relied on Rosling for most of his data.
And like Pinker, Hans Rosling is more than happy to cherry pick his data in order to promote his world view.
Also, like Pinker, he deals in absolutes and black and whites. Absolute poverty (not relative) is down and here's the data to prove it. You're either for this version of reality or you're a head in the sand negativist bent on proving your own misanthropic view.
Of course, in reality, the world is much more complex than data. If you rely solely on data to colour your world view then you're at the whim of whoever is offering and using that data.
We rely on data in our every day lives to understand the world. It crunches complex issues down into handy bitesized numbers. So when we hear the economy is doing well, growth is up 3% and unemployment is down to its lowest level for forty years, data doesn't lie. Well, of course, it sort of does, because life isn't like data absolutes, it's sort of sort of. So something like unemployment numbers can hide those slipping into black market work or those becoming self employed and often effectively black market work. Data can hide a multitude of sins. Why is unemployment down? Is it an economic upturn or is it people being forced off of benefits?
Rosling opens with an absolute gambit. We think the world is getting worse but it isn't, quite the opposite, he argues. Except that's isn't factfulness is it? The rich are getting richer, for a start. Richest 1% on target to own two-thirds of all wealth by 2030. While the poorest may not be getting poorer in the world (that's an absolutist view), Oxfam figures show that wealth has not trickled down, that the poorest 50% of the world who saw no gain in the previous year whilst the richest 1% saw 82% of all wealth created go to them. Eight billionaires own the same wealth as the 3.6 billion people who form the poorest half of the world's population.
That's what absolute poverty data hides. So when Rosling shows us:
This is indeed, in itself, (absolute) good news but it hides other complicated data. But if we were to take Rosling's prescription of focusing on the good news then one can see why he might think the way he does. Of course, he puts this down to some sciencyness...
"The overdramatic worldview draws people to the most negative answers. It is not caused simply by out-of-date knowledge. My experience, over decades of lecturing and testing, has finally brought me to see that the overdramatic worldview comes from the very way our brains work. The brain is a product of millions of years of evolution, and we are hard-wired with instincts that helped our ancestors to survive in small groups of hunters and gatherers. We crave sugar and fat, which used to be life-saving sources of energy when food was scarce. But today these cravings make obesity one of the biggest global health problems. In the same way, we are interested in gossip and dramatic stories, which used to be the only source of news and useful information. This craving for drama causes misconceptions and helps create an overdramatic worldview."
Apart from the silly scienciness of suggesting we are hardwired to crave sugar and fat (don't bother with evidence...did hunter gatherers crave sugar?) just suggest that our craving is causing the obesity epidemic. That's Rosling's logic in a nutshell. Don't look at society unless it suits one's purpose. So our craving for sugar and fat is instinctive, nothing to do with the economic system, media, advertising, lifestyle, nope it's 100% natural and that's what causes obesity. For Rosling, data like a rise in personal wealth, more leisure time, less work are all objective good things without any calories. Yet it may be those very factors that cause obesity, a huge spike in diabetes (just as the wealth we create has the negative balance of CO2 emissions and climate change).
The point is that data isn't objective and there are multiple truths to most sets of data. Yes, it's great we're wealthier and have more leisure time but detrimental things come along for the ride with these improvements.
Back to absolute poverty. Rosling is keen on data showing absolute poverty rate decline, on the ratio between the wealthiest and the poor across the globe, but then strangely leaves out data on the extremes between wealth and poverty and the disparity within every country. It's a well known phenomena that the world is getting richer yet within every country in the world the gap between the richest and poorest is growing at a rate faster than any time since World War II. It's also a well known phenomena that people do not tend to look on their own wealth as objective, they tend to compare it to their neighbour. If Mrs Jones has a 42 inch flatscreen TV this is wealth beyond any imaginings of her parents' generation yet what if every one else has 60 inch TVs?
That's a simplistic way of saying that absolute poverty measures hide a wealth of data about relative poverty measures.
Yes, we are all materially much wealthier than we were 30 years ago objectively. Yet, if you take where I live, the UK, you see that beneath that truism there are disturbing social problems. For the poorest 25% wealth has stagnated under the government's austerity programme. The middle class have stayed relatively static. The poorest 10% have born the greatest brunt with wage growth in stasis and benefits being frozen for five years, the poorest are materially far worse off now than they were five years ago. The richest have seen unprecedented growth, primarily in hidden assets, housing, shares, etc.
Another problem with Rosling's data is that it implies a smooth transition from the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, we've just naturally got wealthier.
Our improvements in living standards have been a long hard struggle, Chartists, the proto-union movement, civil rights movements, suffragettes, 20th Century unions. There was no natural move towards plenty (more in a moment). Rosling suggests there is a trend that will continue. When he argues that "in 1966 half of the world lived in extreme poverty. This had fallen to 9% in 2017," the suggestion is that that trend will only end when we reach 0% poverty. However, recent trends buck that, austerity programmes being the most obvious case.
More importantly, no one thinks this is a bad thing. No one, despite Steven Pinker's assertion, is anti-progress. There are many, however, who question what we mean by this progress.
"It is absolutely true that there are many bad things in this world. The number of conflict fatalities has been falling since the second world war, but the Syrian war has reversed this trend. Terrorism too is rising. Overfishing and the deterioration of the seas are truly worrisome. The list of endangered species is getting longer. But while it is easy to be aware of all the bad things happening in the world, it’s harder to know about the good things. The silent miracle of human progress is too slow and too fragmented to ever qualify as news."
Well, Rosling could also add prisoner numbers, factory farming, gentrification, illegal data collection, consumption, plastic pollution, fertiliser use, trafficking, modern slavery, tax avoidance, mental health numbers, nationalism and erosion of democracies, homelessness, zero hour contracts, wealth inequality and social mobility, and of course, the big cookie, climate change among many other negative factors in our modern world Oddly he's all but silent on these subjects.
The Hans Rosling News then would be the positives of our world economy and culture.
So what does this Hans Rosling Good News News look like?
"Stories about gradual improvements rarely make the front page even when they occur on a dramatic scale and affect millions of people. And thanks to increasing press freedom and improving technology, we hear about more disasters than ever before. This improved reporting is itself a sign of human progress, but it creates the impression of the exact opposite. At the same time, activists and lobbyists manage to make every dip in an improving trend appear to be the end of the world, scaring us with alarmist exaggerations and prophecies."
Who are these activists scaring us I wonder? Why would they? What's the incentive?
I'm figuring there's an underlying argument around climate change here, as there is with Steven Pinker. Pinker isn't a climate change denier but he is an optimist and thus actively plays down the effects of climate change (see a previous post on Pinker's "70s Greenism" claims) and Rosling suggests:
"Our instinct to notice the bad more than the good is related to three things: the misremembering of the past; selective reporting by journalists and activists...
At the same time, activists and lobbyists manage to make every dip in an improving trend appear to be the end of the world...
Remember that the media and activists rely on drama to grab your attention; that negative stories are more dramatic than positive ones; and how simple it is to construct a story of crisis from a temporary dip pulled out of its context of a long-term improvement. When you hear about something terrible, calm yourself by asking: if there had been a positive improvement, would I have heard about that? Even if there had been hundreds of larger improvements, would I have heard?"
Rosling continually highlights activists as those responsible for spreading this bad news virus. Yet, of course, historically it was activists that made all the wonders he talks about come to fruition. His two hobby horses in this extract are world poverty and "girls' education." Does he think that women's education programmes just happened because of the benevolence of Victorian philanthropic gentlemen? Does he think that poverty has fallen because corporations are keen on paying living wages? Every positive change I can think of in western society has come from years, sometimes centuries of struggle, of activism. When he charts the fall in work hours, the rise in leisure, literacy, absolute wealth, fall in slavery, and so on, all were brought about abolitionist activists, union activists, charity activists, social activists, etc.
Activism is essential for any democracy.
"My guess is you feel that me saying that the world is getting better is like me telling you that everything is fine, and that feels ridiculous. I agree. Everything is not fine."
Yet highlighting activism as the driver of disingenuous bad news is doing exactly that. The antonym of active is passive.
When I read the article my immediate thought was of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5 and the Tralfamadorian philosophy, that struggle is pointless as everything is pre-ordained and Billy Pilgrim uses media (a radio show) to spread this good news. In his Tralfamadorian reality, Billy Pilgrim is trapped in a glass bubble with all the material wealth he could wish for but no agency, no freedom.
Whilst Rosling is not necessarily promoting passivity that's what continual good news creates. The classic example is climate change. The news media have completely obliterated it from its news pages. Catastrophic arctic ice melts are less important than royal weddings.
Rosling's good news looks an awful lot like the Tralfamadorian novel:
"There isn’t any particular relationship between the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvellous moments seen all at one time.
Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt."
And his answer is "This is “factfulness”: understanding as a source of mental peace. Like a healthy diet and regular exercise, it can and should become part of people’s daily lives. Start to practise it, and you will make better decisions, stay alert to real dangers and possibilities, and avoid being constantly stressed about the wrong things."
What are the wrong things? Rightly he argues that Anthropomorphic Climate Change is just a fact, what we have to look at is how to avoid catastrophe. This is where he veers from Steven Pinker. Pinker doesn't see a catastrophe because he has blind faith in new technologies (not yet in existence) which will solve CC, human ingenuity will be the answer. We've got out of lots of bad things before with human ingenuity.
So when Rosling links to "factfulness", quelle surprise, it's a piece by Steven Pinker Steven Pinker recommends books to make you an optimist. In which he promotes the idea that things aren't that bad:
"And no, the environment is not hopelessly despoiled and depauperate, say “ecomodernists” such as Ronald Bailey in The End of Doom, Ruth DeFries in The Big Ratchet Chris Thomas in Inheritors of the Earth, and Stewart Brand in Whole Earth Discipline. Children of the 1970s will appreciate the title, an allusion to Brand’s groundbreaking Whole Earth Catalog, which merged technology with the counterculture and encouraged global consciousness with the breathtaking “Earthrise” photograph on the cover."
Ronald Bailey is a science writer, except of course he's not, he's just a journalist with Reason magazine which is funded by David Koch of the Koch Brothers and Cato Institute where Bailey lectured. Reason and Cato are right wing libertarian organizations that promote climate skeptricism (the Kochs are, of course, oil billionaires). Various reviews of Bailey's book argue he uses selective data and, like Pinker his argument: “the solution to future climate change is the same as for other environmental problems—the application of human ingenuity and technology”. That is, don't worry, tech will sort it. Tralfamadorian passivity. Which is fundamentally Pinker's argument.
Reason magazine Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey has spent the bulk of his career speaking sense in a world of polemical alarmism. In this clear, compelling, and fact-based assessment, Bailey provides a detailed examination of the theories, studies, and assumptions currently spurring forecasts of calamity and shaping environmental policy.
As Bailey demonstrates, the way to cement these trends is not to retreat into a maze of paralyzing regulation but to craft our own future through continuing economic and technological development.
In my short talk at Voice & Exit, I argue that any fair analysis of the global trends in fertility, population, biodiversity, technological progress, and economic growth can only conclude that the coming century will be humanity's best ever. "
This is just faith based drivel. Urbanization will lead to rewilding of the planet. What utter tosh.
Population could peak at 8 billion. Nonsense. "If I could get Einstein, Curie and Edison in a room would they be able to predict the future?" he questions. "We stand at the same level of ignorance about the year 2100 as the smartest people on the planet were in 1900 about our time." I assume Bailey's not a fucking idiot so this is clearly just disingenuous. Uh computer models? Scientific progress?
And the best logical fallacy, which I assume underpins his argument, that if growth continues at the same rate as now and wealth continues at the same rate that in 2100 and our modern economy is based on technological innovation then people will have so much technology and wealth they'll find an answer to climate change. Ha ha ha ha ha...oh no, he's not joking. Nope, he might be a fucking idiot. If growth continued at the same levels without decoupling growth from emissions 2100 will easily see a 2 degree warming which no amount of tech could do anything about. This is complete drivel. "The truth of the matter is we already did this, we did it in the 20th century, GDP went from $3 trillion to $60 trillion and population quadrupled but there was an enormous increase in people's wealth and happiness and that kind of thing, we've done it before we can do it again." This is as nonsensical as any Donald Trump tweet. Don't worry, tech will sort out climate change, we did exactly that in the 20th century...uh, except we didn't. Huh? It's complete gobbledygook.
Whilst De Fries book is an optimistic look at human ingenuity over human history she does caution that "Although history shows that ingenuity has brought humanity back from the brink of overshoot time and again, this history does not ensure the same will occur in the future" and focuses on population and food production so I'm not sure what that has to do with depauperation.
Stewart Brand's book is from 2009 and thus quite out of touch with the effects of climate change. He argues for genetic engineering, geoengineering and expanding nuclear power, all have criticisms that could fill a book.
Thomas's Inheritors of the Earth does deal with depauperation but seeks to“throw off the shackles of a pessimism‑laden, loss-only view of the world” by showing that some species thrive, and there are newly developing hybrids. “We should not ignore the gain side of the great biological equation of life,” he argues. With climate change “On the whole, more species like it hot than cold." Is that just me or is this an incredibly simplistic understanding of Climate Change?
Of course, Thomas is actually talking about land animals, he oddly ignores the oceans. And his optimism is sometimes tethered by realism when he notes that yes, we are killing off species at an alarming rate but consider the lily...
David Biello in the NY Times puts things in a neat perspective:
"Instead we are busily creating a homogeneous world, the diversity of plants and animals replaced by 22 billion chickens, 1.5 billion cattle, 1.2 billion sheep and a billion each for goats and pigs, a mix of species determined by the 7.5 billion Homo sapiens on the planet. If all those livestock were to disappear, we would eat through the remaining large animals in a month."
Thomas's view is essentially that of the Gaia theory that the world is a giant ecosystem that heals itself. Again, there are whole books poo pooing that theory. The present evidence in the arctic, for instance, suggests that this isn't the case.
What all the books have in common is both a positivist outlook and the tagline, yes things do seem gloomy but hey, things can get better. That is, like Pinker, the arguments are predominantly based on faith rather than any hard science.
Yet when Rosling discusses Climate Change he does see it as a huge existential crises.
He shows sea level rise and how that will effect the poorest countries in the world, for instance. That IPCC predictions of best and worst outcomes overlap, showing that we're already in big trouble. We know that CO2 in the atmosphere continues to rise. We know that the wealthiest countries produce the most CO2.
He shows how the richest countries still mostly depend on fossil fuels. He argues that poorer nations want these riches too and "nothing will stop them."
While population rates slow by the end of the 21 Century Rosling agrees there will be 11 billion people but that will be peak population.
He shows CO2 emissions for the US and China in order to show that despite China's economic growth the US still pump out more CO2. Of course, China's emissions have remained stable since 2010, the "advanced economies" emissions have gone down, but the rest of the world's emissions have almost trebled since 2000.
Rosling argues "these two billion will come in the next 40 years, they will come where there is very low emissions." This doesn't make any sense as his argument is that developing nations will want what the "richest 3 billion have."
He concludes with a survey showing the British public are incredibly dumb (Well, there's news)...
The UK public vastly overestimated renewables usage.
Rosling: "We overestimate what we have done. We have a halo of solar and wind. We must take this IPCC report seriously and get things done. I give you this boring image but this is the problem, we think we have done more than we have. And we haven't understood how much we have to do."
Surely this is exactly the opposite of what he argues in his book? It's exactly this good news disinformation that makes us passive when we come to Climate Change. The talk was from 2013 so things are much grimmer five years on. How does this fit into the Rosling good news media show?
When Rosling talks about getting things done he doesn't elaborate on what things we need to do.
It's the problem with a statistics only outlook. Rosling doesn't join up the dots. Yes, it's great that absolute poverty levels are down and the world is much richer but if you only look at that set of statistics it happens in a Billy Pilgrim like bubble. How did we get richer? By burning fossil fuels. which is destroying our environment. That doesn't mean, as Pinker likes to argue, that anyone with this view is a Luddite who wants to live in a hut hunter gathering in the woods. You can have economic growth without emissions. "Advanced Western Economies" have decoupled growth from emissions, as Pinker is keen to show in his new book, Enlightenment Now, but they've done so by moving to non-manufacturing economies based on consumption of goods and services, financial management and intensive farming. That has meant manufacturing has been exported to developing nations, where lo and behold, the greatest emission rises are being exhibited, to massive tax avoidance using offshore havens, creating enormous inequality within nations and intensive factory animal farming and destructive fertiliser use (which, of course, does not show as data in GDP).
That's it on climate change from Rosling. In fact pop Hans Rosling Climate Change in a google search and every hit for page after page is on population and CC. Population isn't the problem. Consumption is. Surely if Climate Change predictions are correct it doesn't really matter whether the trajectory of absolute poverty continues downwards, that more girls learn to read. A sobering grim outlook on energy demand and CO2 emissions is provided by the International Energy Agency (IEA) and they've been recently outed as accused of undermining global shift from fossil fuels.
At The Guardian Rosling reiterates his arguments using colourful Lego bricks for the data challenged. He claims that the richest nations produce the greatest emissions whilst the poorest next to nothing. But this data has changed dramatically in the last five years. Emissions are lowering in developed nations, rising in developing nations.
"Let me show you the world, says Swedish academic Han Rosling as he demonstrates the dynamics of population growth, child mortality and carbon dioxide emissions. The challenge for the world is to get everyone out of extreme poverty and get the richest people to use less fossil fuels so that everyone can share their energy levels, he says." The Guardian
But it isn't population that is the problem, it's our Western lifestyle. The one we export that correlates with the great improvements he claims as good news.
I'm still perplexed as to what the media would look like in Hans Rosling's optimistic world.
"Our instinct to notice the bad more than the good is related to three things: the misremembering of the past; selective reporting by journalists and activists; and the feeling that as long as things are bad, it’s heartless to say they are getting better. For centuries, older people have romanticised their youths and insisted that things ain’t what they used to be. Well, that’s true. Most things used to be worse. This tendency to misremember is compounded by the never-ending negative news from across the world."
So is he suggesting that we really should be filling our newspapers with world hunger down for 45th year in a row? How would we make sense of real world politics? Isn't this called propaganda? Didn't the Soviet Union do this? Even while the Soviet Union was falling apart (see Adam Curtis's Hypernormalisation):
"We live in a time of great uncertainty and confusion. Events keep happening that seem inexplicable and out of control. Donald Trump, Brexit, the War in Syria, the endless migrant crisis, random bomb attacks. And those who are supposed to be in power are paralysed - they have no idea what to do.
This film is the epic story of how we got to this strange place. It explains not only why these chaotic events are happening - but also why we, and our politicians, cannot understand them.
It shows that what has happened is that all of us in the West - not just the politicians and the journalists and the experts, but we ourselves - have retreated into a simplified, and often completely fake version of the world. But because it is all around us we accept it as normal." Adam Curtis: Hypernormalisation.
Our instinct to notice the bad more than the good is also related to our sense of normality. During World War II most bad news (beyond the war) would have gone unnoticed. During times of peace and prosperity it's natural to note the things that do not fit in with the narrative of peace and prosperity.
This extract is typical of Rosling's thinking: "My guess is you feel that me saying that the world is getting better is like me telling you that everything is fine, and that feels ridiculous. I agree. Everything is not fine. We should still be very concerned. As long as there are plane crashes, preventable child deaths, endangered species, climate change sceptics, male chauvinists, crazy dictators, toxic waste, journalists in prison, and girls not getting an education, we cannot relax. But it is just as ridiculous to look away from the progress that has been made. The consequent loss of hope can be devastating. When people wrongly believe that nothing is improving, they may lose confidence in measures that actually work."
You either believe, like Rosling, that the world is getting better or you are hopeless, devastated and think nothing is getting better. There is no inbetween. You cannot in this argument (just as in Pinker's Enlightenment Now) hold both that the world has improved in many material ways but has also deteriorated in many material ways. Morally we are much more accepting and free to choose our own understanding of morality yet at the same time we are constricted morally more than at any other time in history. One can hold both views. We're wealthier but is the cost climate change? We're freer to choose our identity yet perversely we are the most conformist age since the 1950s. There is always gains and losses.
Rosling summarizes his position thus:
"How can we help our brains to realise that things are getting better? Think of the world as a very sick premature baby in an incubator. After a week, she is improving, but she has to stay in the incubator because her health is still critical. Does it make sense to say that the infant’s situation is improving? Yes. Does it make sense to say it is bad? Yes, absolutely. Does saying “things are improving” imply that everything is fine, and we should all not worry? Not at all: it’s both bad and better. That is how we must think about the current state of the world."
But how does Climate Change fit into that model? It's both bad and getting worse. Or indeed, the other things I mention above, income inequality, tax avoidance, prisoner numbers, and so on.
Material gains have been astonishing. But that's only part of the picture of progress, surely?
I recently had an...um..."discussion" with someone online about this (in relation to Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now) and he argued:
"And lets just assume you are correct than your premise is self defeated because we now live in a RELATIVE level of wealth that 17th century Monarchs could never fathom. So by a relative marker we are living better than the kings and queens of Europe 300 to 400 years ago. Oh wait you only want to use relative poverty in a narrowly defined way that ignores all other relative wealth measures because that would weaken your position. Cherry picking data isn't evidence it is falsehood."
Yes, our material wealth would seem beyond a 17th Century monarch's wildest dreams. What has thou there that thy call a...smartphone?
And that's exactly the problem with absolute measures. You could compare quite easily the society of 17th Century Europe with that of 13th Century Europe and see little change in material wealth. Technology since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution has made any such comparisons meaningless. You can't even absolutely compare the poorest people now with the poorest people of 17th Century Europe because of technological changes. However, in relative terms of relative poverty you can compare the 17th century monarch to the average peasant of the time, and the average equivalent, say a CEO like Jeff Bezos to an average worker now, and you'll see the relative wealth between the two has changed little. Or actually, you'll find that it is perhaps worse now.
In Rosling's good news show the news would be "Get the news, Get the news. Average peasant better off now in every way compared to peasants of 17th Century Europe."
Whereas the actual news might be, one man owns the wealth of the whole population of 80 million people of one country that he relies on for the minerals in his consumer products.
Both are true but which is more relevant to our world?
More importantly, Rosling argues that "it is just as ridiculous to look away from the progress that has been made. The consequent loss of hope can be devastating. When people wrongly believe that nothing is improving, they may lose confidence in measures that actually work."
I would argue, "it is ridiculous to look away from the problems that face our world. The consequent passive attitude to actual real world events like climate change, tax avoidance, prisoner numbers and so on lead to misunderstanding at best, at worst indifference. When people believe that things will naturally improve through faith in technology or rely on hope they are blind to their own part in world economic, political and social affairs."
The Guardian, published an edited excerpt from Hans Rosling's posthumously published Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong about the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think:
Good news at last: the world isn’t as horrific as you think
"Training yourself how to put the news into perspective – practising ‘factfulness’ – will change your outlook for the better," argues Rosling.
Open your curtains onto the world of factfulness.
You'll feel better, happier, factfuller...even if the facts are all bollocks
I call it the overdramatic worldview. It’s stressful and misleading. In fact, the vast majority of the world’s population live somewhere in the middle of the income scale. Perhaps they are not what we think of as middle class, but they are not living in extreme poverty. Their girls go to school, their children get vaccinated. Perhaps not on every single measure, or every single year, but step by step, year by year, the world is improving. In the past two centuries, life expectancy has more than doubled. Although the world faces huge challenges, we have made tremendous progress."
If it sounds like Steven Pinker territory that's because Pinker relied on Rosling for most of his data.
And like Pinker, Hans Rosling is more than happy to cherry pick his data in order to promote his world view.
Also, like Pinker, he deals in absolutes and black and whites. Absolute poverty (not relative) is down and here's the data to prove it. You're either for this version of reality or you're a head in the sand negativist bent on proving your own misanthropic view.
"I become quite melancholy and deeply grieved to see men behave to each other as they do. Everywhere I find nothing but base flattery, injustice , self-interest, deceit and roguery. I cannot bear it any longer; I'm furious; and my intention is to break with all mankind." Alceste, Moliere's Le Misantrope
We rely on data in our every day lives to understand the world. It crunches complex issues down into handy bitesized numbers. So when we hear the economy is doing well, growth is up 3% and unemployment is down to its lowest level for forty years, data doesn't lie. Well, of course, it sort of does, because life isn't like data absolutes, it's sort of sort of. So something like unemployment numbers can hide those slipping into black market work or those becoming self employed and often effectively black market work. Data can hide a multitude of sins. Why is unemployment down? Is it an economic upturn or is it people being forced off of benefits?
Rosling opens with an absolute gambit. We think the world is getting worse but it isn't, quite the opposite, he argues. Except that's isn't factfulness is it? The rich are getting richer, for a start. Richest 1% on target to own two-thirds of all wealth by 2030. While the poorest may not be getting poorer in the world (that's an absolutist view), Oxfam figures show that wealth has not trickled down, that the poorest 50% of the world who saw no gain in the previous year whilst the richest 1% saw 82% of all wealth created go to them. Eight billionaires own the same wealth as the 3.6 billion people who form the poorest half of the world's population.
That's what absolute poverty data hides. So when Rosling shows us:
This is indeed, in itself, (absolute) good news but it hides other complicated data. But if we were to take Rosling's prescription of focusing on the good news then one can see why he might think the way he does. Of course, he puts this down to some sciencyness...
"The overdramatic worldview draws people to the most negative answers. It is not caused simply by out-of-date knowledge. My experience, over decades of lecturing and testing, has finally brought me to see that the overdramatic worldview comes from the very way our brains work. The brain is a product of millions of years of evolution, and we are hard-wired with instincts that helped our ancestors to survive in small groups of hunters and gatherers. We crave sugar and fat, which used to be life-saving sources of energy when food was scarce. But today these cravings make obesity one of the biggest global health problems. In the same way, we are interested in gossip and dramatic stories, which used to be the only source of news and useful information. This craving for drama causes misconceptions and helps create an overdramatic worldview."
Apart from the silly scienciness of suggesting we are hardwired to crave sugar and fat (don't bother with evidence...did hunter gatherers crave sugar?) just suggest that our craving is causing the obesity epidemic. That's Rosling's logic in a nutshell. Don't look at society unless it suits one's purpose. So our craving for sugar and fat is instinctive, nothing to do with the economic system, media, advertising, lifestyle, nope it's 100% natural and that's what causes obesity. For Rosling, data like a rise in personal wealth, more leisure time, less work are all objective good things without any calories. Yet it may be those very factors that cause obesity, a huge spike in diabetes (just as the wealth we create has the negative balance of CO2 emissions and climate change).
The point is that data isn't objective and there are multiple truths to most sets of data. Yes, it's great we're wealthier and have more leisure time but detrimental things come along for the ride with these improvements.
Back to absolute poverty. Rosling is keen on data showing absolute poverty rate decline, on the ratio between the wealthiest and the poor across the globe, but then strangely leaves out data on the extremes between wealth and poverty and the disparity within every country. It's a well known phenomena that the world is getting richer yet within every country in the world the gap between the richest and poorest is growing at a rate faster than any time since World War II. It's also a well known phenomena that people do not tend to look on their own wealth as objective, they tend to compare it to their neighbour. If Mrs Jones has a 42 inch flatscreen TV this is wealth beyond any imaginings of her parents' generation yet what if every one else has 60 inch TVs?
That's a simplistic way of saying that absolute poverty measures hide a wealth of data about relative poverty measures.
Yes, we are all materially much wealthier than we were 30 years ago objectively. Yet, if you take where I live, the UK, you see that beneath that truism there are disturbing social problems. For the poorest 25% wealth has stagnated under the government's austerity programme. The middle class have stayed relatively static. The poorest 10% have born the greatest brunt with wage growth in stasis and benefits being frozen for five years, the poorest are materially far worse off now than they were five years ago. The richest have seen unprecedented growth, primarily in hidden assets, housing, shares, etc.
Absolute poverty decreasing is a good thing but wealth disparity is a bad thing. In our economic system the wealthy inevitably get wealthier.
Our improvements in living standards have been a long hard struggle, Chartists, the proto-union movement, civil rights movements, suffragettes, 20th Century unions. There was no natural move towards plenty (more in a moment). Rosling suggests there is a trend that will continue. When he argues that "in 1966 half of the world lived in extreme poverty. This had fallen to 9% in 2017," the suggestion is that that trend will only end when we reach 0% poverty. However, recent trends buck that, austerity programmes being the most obvious case.
More importantly, no one thinks this is a bad thing. No one, despite Steven Pinker's assertion, is anti-progress. There are many, however, who question what we mean by this progress.
"It is absolutely true that there are many bad things in this world. The number of conflict fatalities has been falling since the second world war, but the Syrian war has reversed this trend. Terrorism too is rising. Overfishing and the deterioration of the seas are truly worrisome. The list of endangered species is getting longer. But while it is easy to be aware of all the bad things happening in the world, it’s harder to know about the good things. The silent miracle of human progress is too slow and too fragmented to ever qualify as news."
Well, Rosling could also add prisoner numbers, factory farming, gentrification, illegal data collection, consumption, plastic pollution, fertiliser use, trafficking, modern slavery, tax avoidance, mental health numbers, nationalism and erosion of democracies, homelessness, zero hour contracts, wealth inequality and social mobility, and of course, the big cookie, climate change among many other negative factors in our modern world Oddly he's all but silent on these subjects.
The Hans Rosling News then would be the positives of our world economy and culture.
Not plastic pollution (which our happy news tends to portray as bags and straws rather than reality that most ocean plastic is trawler nets and car residues)
Nationalism is sweeping Europe, Turkey, Poland, Hungary, all pushing to the extreme right
Social mobility and social inequality at the worst since the war in the UK
Corporations have no social responsibility and are rewarded for it with government tax initiatives
Oddly, such things are rarely mentioned in the news. The headlines on the BBC today are the Syria crisis and the Skripal case alongside the Duke of Edinburgh leaving hospital and a child's life support system to be turned off.
Sure, they aren't happy stories, of course Syria is awful, Russia is awful, The Duke of Edinburgh is awful and I don't know anything about the human interest story to top off the headlines. But hidden away is a report saying "How close the world is to a catastrophic collapse of giant ocean currents is unknown, making halting global warming more critical than ever." "Spikes in air pollution can heighten risk of chest infections, research suggests." "No plan to protect Queensland's green-haired turtle from extinction." Among other stories get no mention on the BBC.
This little critter's going to die out yet we do everything in our power to keep this one alive...
"Stories about gradual improvements rarely make the front page even when they occur on a dramatic scale and affect millions of people. And thanks to increasing press freedom and improving technology, we hear about more disasters than ever before. This improved reporting is itself a sign of human progress, but it creates the impression of the exact opposite. At the same time, activists and lobbyists manage to make every dip in an improving trend appear to be the end of the world, scaring us with alarmist exaggerations and prophecies."
Who are these activists scaring us I wonder? Why would they? What's the incentive?
I'm figuring there's an underlying argument around climate change here, as there is with Steven Pinker. Pinker isn't a climate change denier but he is an optimist and thus actively plays down the effects of climate change (see a previous post on Pinker's "70s Greenism" claims) and Rosling suggests:
"Our instinct to notice the bad more than the good is related to three things: the misremembering of the past; selective reporting by journalists and activists...
At the same time, activists and lobbyists manage to make every dip in an improving trend appear to be the end of the world...
Remember that the media and activists rely on drama to grab your attention; that negative stories are more dramatic than positive ones; and how simple it is to construct a story of crisis from a temporary dip pulled out of its context of a long-term improvement. When you hear about something terrible, calm yourself by asking: if there had been a positive improvement, would I have heard about that? Even if there had been hundreds of larger improvements, would I have heard?"
Rosling continually highlights activists as those responsible for spreading this bad news virus. Yet, of course, historically it was activists that made all the wonders he talks about come to fruition. His two hobby horses in this extract are world poverty and "girls' education." Does he think that women's education programmes just happened because of the benevolence of Victorian philanthropic gentlemen? Does he think that poverty has fallen because corporations are keen on paying living wages? Every positive change I can think of in western society has come from years, sometimes centuries of struggle, of activism. When he charts the fall in work hours, the rise in leisure, literacy, absolute wealth, fall in slavery, and so on, all were brought about abolitionist activists, union activists, charity activists, social activists, etc.
Activism is essential for any democracy.
Emily Davison famously throwing herself in front of Anmer, King George V's horse, dying in order to publicize the great need for equal votes for jockeys... who up to that point, predominantly being working class men, were ineligible to vote.
Yet highlighting activism as the driver of disingenuous bad news is doing exactly that. The antonym of active is passive.
When I read the article my immediate thought was of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5 and the Tralfamadorian philosophy, that struggle is pointless as everything is pre-ordained and Billy Pilgrim uses media (a radio show) to spread this good news. In his Tralfamadorian reality, Billy Pilgrim is trapped in a glass bubble with all the material wealth he could wish for but no agency, no freedom.
Whilst Rosling is not necessarily promoting passivity that's what continual good news creates. The classic example is climate change. The news media have completely obliterated it from its news pages. Catastrophic arctic ice melts are less important than royal weddings.
Rosling's good news looks an awful lot like the Tralfamadorian novel:
"There isn’t any particular relationship between the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvellous moments seen all at one time.
Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt."
Happy captivity in Slaughterhouse 5
What are the wrong things? Rightly he argues that Anthropomorphic Climate Change is just a fact, what we have to look at is how to avoid catastrophe. This is where he veers from Steven Pinker. Pinker doesn't see a catastrophe because he has blind faith in new technologies (not yet in existence) which will solve CC, human ingenuity will be the answer. We've got out of lots of bad things before with human ingenuity.
Talk to the hand, kid.
"And no, the environment is not hopelessly despoiled and depauperate, say “ecomodernists” such as Ronald Bailey in The End of Doom, Ruth DeFries in The Big Ratchet Chris Thomas in Inheritors of the Earth, and Stewart Brand in Whole Earth Discipline. Children of the 1970s will appreciate the title, an allusion to Brand’s groundbreaking Whole Earth Catalog, which merged technology with the counterculture and encouraged global consciousness with the breathtaking “Earthrise” photograph on the cover."
Ronald Bailey is a science writer, except of course he's not, he's just a journalist with Reason magazine which is funded by David Koch of the Koch Brothers and Cato Institute where Bailey lectured. Reason and Cato are right wing libertarian organizations that promote climate skeptricism (the Kochs are, of course, oil billionaires). Various reviews of Bailey's book argue he uses selective data and, like Pinker his argument: “the solution to future climate change is the same as for other environmental problems—the application of human ingenuity and technology”. That is, don't worry, tech will sort it. Tralfamadorian passivity. Which is fundamentally Pinker's argument.
Bailey crystallizes his vision in this talk on his book The End of Doom which I can't even be bothered to criticize in detail as it's so obviously nonsense.
"Throughout the past five decades there have been many forecasts of impending environmental doom. These projections have universally been proven wrong. Those who have bet on human resourcefulness, on the other hand, have almost always been correct.Reason magazine Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey has spent the bulk of his career speaking sense in a world of polemical alarmism. In this clear, compelling, and fact-based assessment, Bailey provides a detailed examination of the theories, studies, and assumptions currently spurring forecasts of calamity and shaping environmental policy.
As Bailey demonstrates, the way to cement these trends is not to retreat into a maze of paralyzing regulation but to craft our own future through continuing economic and technological development.
In my short talk at Voice & Exit, I argue that any fair analysis of the global trends in fertility, population, biodiversity, technological progress, and economic growth can only conclude that the coming century will be humanity's best ever. "
This is just faith based drivel. Urbanization will lead to rewilding of the planet. What utter tosh.
Population could peak at 8 billion. Nonsense. "If I could get Einstein, Curie and Edison in a room would they be able to predict the future?" he questions. "We stand at the same level of ignorance about the year 2100 as the smartest people on the planet were in 1900 about our time." I assume Bailey's not a fucking idiot so this is clearly just disingenuous. Uh computer models? Scientific progress?
And the best logical fallacy, which I assume underpins his argument, that if growth continues at the same rate as now and wealth continues at the same rate that in 2100 and our modern economy is based on technological innovation then people will have so much technology and wealth they'll find an answer to climate change. Ha ha ha ha ha...oh no, he's not joking. Nope, he might be a fucking idiot. If growth continued at the same levels without decoupling growth from emissions 2100 will easily see a 2 degree warming which no amount of tech could do anything about. This is complete drivel. "The truth of the matter is we already did this, we did it in the 20th century, GDP went from $3 trillion to $60 trillion and population quadrupled but there was an enormous increase in people's wealth and happiness and that kind of thing, we've done it before we can do it again." This is as nonsensical as any Donald Trump tweet. Don't worry, tech will sort out climate change, we did exactly that in the 20th century...uh, except we didn't. Huh? It's complete gobbledygook.
I hope that's not Hans Rosling's good news.
Stewart Brand's book is from 2009 and thus quite out of touch with the effects of climate change. He argues for genetic engineering, geoengineering and expanding nuclear power, all have criticisms that could fill a book.
Thomas's Inheritors of the Earth does deal with depauperation but seeks to“throw off the shackles of a pessimism‑laden, loss-only view of the world” by showing that some species thrive, and there are newly developing hybrids. “We should not ignore the gain side of the great biological equation of life,” he argues. With climate change “On the whole, more species like it hot than cold." Is that just me or is this an incredibly simplistic understanding of Climate Change?
Of course, Thomas is actually talking about land animals, he oddly ignores the oceans. And his optimism is sometimes tethered by realism when he notes that yes, we are killing off species at an alarming rate but consider the lily...
David Biello in the NY Times puts things in a neat perspective:
"Instead we are busily creating a homogeneous world, the diversity of plants and animals replaced by 22 billion chickens, 1.5 billion cattle, 1.2 billion sheep and a billion each for goats and pigs, a mix of species determined by the 7.5 billion Homo sapiens on the planet. If all those livestock were to disappear, we would eat through the remaining large animals in a month."
Thomas's view is essentially that of the Gaia theory that the world is a giant ecosystem that heals itself. Again, there are whole books poo pooing that theory. The present evidence in the arctic, for instance, suggests that this isn't the case.
What all the books have in common is both a positivist outlook and the tagline, yes things do seem gloomy but hey, things can get better. That is, like Pinker, the arguments are predominantly based on faith rather than any hard science.
Yet when Rosling discusses Climate Change he does see it as a huge existential crises.
Rosling argues "these two billion will come in the next 40 years, they will come where there is very low emissions." This doesn't make any sense as his argument is that developing nations will want what the "richest 3 billion have."
He concludes with a survey showing the British public are incredibly dumb (Well, there's news)...
Rosling: "We overestimate what we have done. We have a halo of solar and wind. We must take this IPCC report seriously and get things done. I give you this boring image but this is the problem, we think we have done more than we have. And we haven't understood how much we have to do."
Surely this is exactly the opposite of what he argues in his book? It's exactly this good news disinformation that makes us passive when we come to Climate Change. The talk was from 2013 so things are much grimmer five years on. How does this fit into the Rosling good news media show?
When Rosling talks about getting things done he doesn't elaborate on what things we need to do.
It's the problem with a statistics only outlook. Rosling doesn't join up the dots. Yes, it's great that absolute poverty levels are down and the world is much richer but if you only look at that set of statistics it happens in a Billy Pilgrim like bubble. How did we get richer? By burning fossil fuels. which is destroying our environment. That doesn't mean, as Pinker likes to argue, that anyone with this view is a Luddite who wants to live in a hut hunter gathering in the woods. You can have economic growth without emissions. "Advanced Western Economies" have decoupled growth from emissions, as Pinker is keen to show in his new book, Enlightenment Now, but they've done so by moving to non-manufacturing economies based on consumption of goods and services, financial management and intensive farming. That has meant manufacturing has been exported to developing nations, where lo and behold, the greatest emission rises are being exhibited, to massive tax avoidance using offshore havens, creating enormous inequality within nations and intensive factory animal farming and destructive fertiliser use (which, of course, does not show as data in GDP).
That's it on climate change from Rosling. In fact pop Hans Rosling Climate Change in a google search and every hit for page after page is on population and CC. Population isn't the problem. Consumption is. Surely if Climate Change predictions are correct it doesn't really matter whether the trajectory of absolute poverty continues downwards, that more girls learn to read. A sobering grim outlook on energy demand and CO2 emissions is provided by the International Energy Agency (IEA) and they've been recently outed as accused of undermining global shift from fossil fuels.
At The Guardian Rosling reiterates his arguments using colourful Lego bricks for the data challenged. He claims that the richest nations produce the greatest emissions whilst the poorest next to nothing. But this data has changed dramatically in the last five years. Emissions are lowering in developed nations, rising in developing nations.
"Let me show you the world, says Swedish academic Han Rosling as he demonstrates the dynamics of population growth, child mortality and carbon dioxide emissions. The challenge for the world is to get everyone out of extreme poverty and get the richest people to use less fossil fuels so that everyone can share their energy levels, he says." The Guardian
But it isn't population that is the problem, it's our Western lifestyle. The one we export that correlates with the great improvements he claims as good news.
I'm still perplexed as to what the media would look like in Hans Rosling's optimistic world.
Obviously not carpet bombing in the Middle East
Or mineral mining in the DRC
Or of the three tax paradises two are British protectorates and the other a British Commonwealth nation...though, of course, none of these appear in the real 'bad' news either
So is he suggesting that we really should be filling our newspapers with world hunger down for 45th year in a row? How would we make sense of real world politics? Isn't this called propaganda? Didn't the Soviet Union do this? Even while the Soviet Union was falling apart (see Adam Curtis's Hypernormalisation):
"We live in a time of great uncertainty and confusion. Events keep happening that seem inexplicable and out of control. Donald Trump, Brexit, the War in Syria, the endless migrant crisis, random bomb attacks. And those who are supposed to be in power are paralysed - they have no idea what to do.
This film is the epic story of how we got to this strange place. It explains not only why these chaotic events are happening - but also why we, and our politicians, cannot understand them.
It shows that what has happened is that all of us in the West - not just the politicians and the journalists and the experts, but we ourselves - have retreated into a simplified, and often completely fake version of the world. But because it is all around us we accept it as normal." Adam Curtis: Hypernormalisation.
Our instinct to notice the bad more than the good is also related to our sense of normality. During World War II most bad news (beyond the war) would have gone unnoticed. During times of peace and prosperity it's natural to note the things that do not fit in with the narrative of peace and prosperity.
This extract is typical of Rosling's thinking: "My guess is you feel that me saying that the world is getting better is like me telling you that everything is fine, and that feels ridiculous. I agree. Everything is not fine. We should still be very concerned. As long as there are plane crashes, preventable child deaths, endangered species, climate change sceptics, male chauvinists, crazy dictators, toxic waste, journalists in prison, and girls not getting an education, we cannot relax. But it is just as ridiculous to look away from the progress that has been made. The consequent loss of hope can be devastating. When people wrongly believe that nothing is improving, they may lose confidence in measures that actually work."
You either believe, like Rosling, that the world is getting better or you are hopeless, devastated and think nothing is getting better. There is no inbetween. You cannot in this argument (just as in Pinker's Enlightenment Now) hold both that the world has improved in many material ways but has also deteriorated in many material ways. Morally we are much more accepting and free to choose our own understanding of morality yet at the same time we are constricted morally more than at any other time in history. One can hold both views. We're wealthier but is the cost climate change? We're freer to choose our identity yet perversely we are the most conformist age since the 1950s. There is always gains and losses.
Rosling summarizes his position thus:
"How can we help our brains to realise that things are getting better? Think of the world as a very sick premature baby in an incubator. After a week, she is improving, but she has to stay in the incubator because her health is still critical. Does it make sense to say that the infant’s situation is improving? Yes. Does it make sense to say it is bad? Yes, absolutely. Does saying “things are improving” imply that everything is fine, and we should all not worry? Not at all: it’s both bad and better. That is how we must think about the current state of the world."
But how does Climate Change fit into that model? It's both bad and getting worse. Or indeed, the other things I mention above, income inequality, tax avoidance, prisoner numbers, and so on.
Material gains have been astonishing. But that's only part of the picture of progress, surely?
I recently had an...um..."discussion" with someone online about this (in relation to Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now) and he argued:
"And lets just assume you are correct than your premise is self defeated because we now live in a RELATIVE level of wealth that 17th century Monarchs could never fathom. So by a relative marker we are living better than the kings and queens of Europe 300 to 400 years ago. Oh wait you only want to use relative poverty in a narrowly defined way that ignores all other relative wealth measures because that would weaken your position. Cherry picking data isn't evidence it is falsehood."
Yes, our material wealth would seem beyond a 17th Century monarch's wildest dreams. What has thou there that thy call a...smartphone?
And that's exactly the problem with absolute measures. You could compare quite easily the society of 17th Century Europe with that of 13th Century Europe and see little change in material wealth. Technology since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution has made any such comparisons meaningless. You can't even absolutely compare the poorest people now with the poorest people of 17th Century Europe because of technological changes. However, in relative terms of relative poverty you can compare the 17th century monarch to the average peasant of the time, and the average equivalent, say a CEO like Jeff Bezos to an average worker now, and you'll see the relative wealth between the two has changed little. Or actually, you'll find that it is perhaps worse now.
In Rosling's good news show the news would be "Get the news, Get the news. Average peasant better off now in every way compared to peasants of 17th Century Europe."
Whereas the actual news might be, one man owns the wealth of the whole population of 80 million people of one country that he relies on for the minerals in his consumer products.
Both are true but which is more relevant to our world?
More importantly, Rosling argues that "it is just as ridiculous to look away from the progress that has been made. The consequent loss of hope can be devastating. When people wrongly believe that nothing is improving, they may lose confidence in measures that actually work."
I would argue, "it is ridiculous to look away from the problems that face our world. The consequent passive attitude to actual real world events like climate change, tax avoidance, prisoner numbers and so on lead to misunderstanding at best, at worst indifference. When people believe that things will naturally improve through faith in technology or rely on hope they are blind to their own part in world economic, political and social affairs."
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