Factfulness (Page 2 sur 3)

The Urgency Instinct

Now or never! Learn Factfulness now! Tomorrow may be too late!

You have reached the final instinct. Now it is time for you to decide. This
moment will never come back. Never again will all these instincts be right
there at the front of your mind. You have a unique opportunity, today, right
now, to capture the insights of this book and completely change the way you
think forever. Or you can just finish the book, close it, say to yourself “that
was strange,” and carry on exactly as before.
But you have to decide now. You have to act now. Will you change the way
you think today? Or live in ignorance forever? It’s up to you.
You have probably heard something like this before, from a salesperson or
an activist. Both use a lot of the same techniques: “Act now, or lose the
chance forever.” They are deliberately triggering your urgency instinct. The
call to action makes you think less critically, decide more quickly, and act
now.

Relax. It’s almost never true. It’s almost never that urgent, and it’s almost
never an either or or. You can put the book down if you like and do something
else. In a week or a month or a year you can pick it up again and remind
yourself of its main points, and it won’t be too late. That is actually a better
way to learn than trying to cram it all in at once.
The urgency instinct makes us want to take immediate action in the face of
a perceived imminent danger. It must have served us humans well in the
distant past. If we thought there might be a lion in the grass, it wasn’t sensible
to do too much analysis. Those who stopped and carefully analyzed the
probabilities are not our ancestors. We are the offspring of those who decided
and acted quickly with insufficient information. Today, we still need the
urgency instinct—for example, when a car comes out of nowhere and we
need to take evasive action. But now that we have eliminated most immediate
dangers and are left with more complex and often more abstract problems, the
urgency instinct can also lead us astray when it comes to our understanding
the world around us. It makes us stressed, amplifies our other instincts and
makes them harder to control, blocks us from thinking analytically, tempts us
to make up our minds too fast, and encourages us to take drastic actions that
we haven’t thought through.

We do not seem to have a similar instinct to act when faced with risks that
are far off in the future. In fact, in the face of future risks, we can be pretty
slothful. That is why so few people save enough for their retirement.
This attitude toward future risk is a big problem for activists who are
working on long timescales. How can they wake us up? How can they
galvanize us into action? Very often, it is by convincing us that an uncertain
future risk is actually a sure immediate risk, that we have a historic
opportunity to solve an important problem and it must be tackled now or
never: that is, by triggering the urgency instinct.
This method sure can make us act but it can also create unnecessary stress
and poor decisions. It can also drain credibility and trust from their cause. The
constant alarms make us numb to real urgency. The activists who present
things as more urgent than they are, wanting to call us to action, are boys
crying wolf. And we remember how that story ends: with a field full of dead
sheep.
Learn to Control the Urgency Instinct. Special
Offer! Today Only!
When people tell me we must act now, it makes me hesitate. In most cases,
they are just trying to stop me from thinking clearly.

A Convenient Urgency

FACT QUESTION 13
Global climate experts believe that, over the next 100 years, the average temperature
will …
A: get warmer
B: remain the same
C: get colder

“We need to create fear!” That’s what Al Gore said to me at the start of our
first conversation about how to teach climate change. It was 2009 and we
were backstage at a TED conference in Los Angeles. Al Gore asked me to
help him and use Gapminder’s bubble graphs to show a worst-case future
impact of a continued increase in CO emissions.
I had a profound respect at that time for Al Gore’s achievements in
explaining and acting on climate change, and I still do. I am sure you got the
fact question at the top of this section right: it’s the one question where our
audiences always beat the chimps, with the large majority of people (from
94 percent in Finland, Hungary, and Norway, to 81 percent in Canada and the
United States, to 76 percent in Japan) knowing very well what drastic change
the climate experts are foreseeing. That high level of awareness is in no small
part thanks to Al Gore. So is the enormous achievement of the 2015 Paris
Agreement on reduction of climate change. He was—and still is—a hero to
me. I agreed with him completely that swift action on climate change was
needed, and I was excited at the thought of collaborating with him.
But I couldn’t agree to what he had asked.

I don’t like fear. Fear of war plus the panic of urgency made me see a
Russian pilot and blood on the floor. Fear of pandemic plus the panic of
urgency made me close the road and cause the drownings of all those
mothers, children, and fishermen. Fear plus urgency make for stupid, drastic
decisions with unpredictable side effects. Climate change is too important for
that. It needs systematic analysis, thought-through decisions, incremental
actions, and careful evaluation.

And I don’t like exaggeration. Exaggeration undermines the credibility of
well-founded data: in this case, data showing that climate change is real, that
it is largely caused by greenhouse gases from human activities such as
burning fossil fuels, and that taking swift and broad action now would be
cheaper than waiting until costly and unacceptable climate change happened.
Exaggeration, once discovered, makes people tune out altogether.
I insisted that I would never show the worst-case line without showing the
probable and the best-case lines as well. Picking only the worst-case scenario
and—worse—continuing the line beyond the scientifically based predictions
would fall far outside Gapminder’s mission to help people understand the
basic facts. It would be using our credibility to make a call to action. Al Gore
continued to press his case for fearful animated bubbles beyond the expert
forecasts, over several more conversations, until finally I closed the
discussion down. “Mr. Vice President. No numbers, no bubbles.”
Some aspects of the future are easier to predict than others. Weather
forecasts are rarely accurate more than a week into the future. Forecasting a
country’s economic growth and unemployment rates is also surprisingly
difficult. That is because of the complexity of the systems involved. How
many things do you need to predict, and how quickly do they change? By
next week, there will have been billions of changes of temperature, wind
speed, humidity. By next month, billions of dollars will have changed hands
billions of times.

In contrast, demographic forecasts are amazingly accurate decades into the
future because the systems involved—essentially, births and deaths—are quite
simple. Children are born, grow up, have more children, and then die. Each
individual cycle takes roughly 70 years.
But the future is always uncertain to some degree. And whenever we talk
about the future we should be open and clear about the level of uncertainty
involved. We should not pick the most dramatic estimates and show a worstcase scenario as if it were certain. People would find out! We should ideally
show a mid-forecast, and also a range of alternative possibilities, from best to
worst. If we have to round the numbers we should round to our own
disadvantage. This protects our reputations and means we never give people a
reason to stop listening.
Insist on the Data
Al Gore’s words echoed around my head long after that first conversation.
To be absolutely clear, I am deeply concerned about climate change
because I am convinced it is real—as real as Ebola was in 2014. I understand
the temptation to raise support by picking the worst projections and denying
the huge uncertainties in the numbers. But those who care about climate
change should stop scaring people with unlikely scenarios. Most people
already know about and acknowledge the problem. Insisting on it is like
kicking at an open door. It’s time to move on from talking talking talking.
Let’s instead use that energy to solve the problem by taking action: action
driven not by fear and urgency but by data and coolheaded analysis.
So, what is the solution? Well, it’s easy. Anyone emitting lots of
greenhouse gas must stop doing that as soon as possible. We know who that
is: the people on Level 4 who have by far the highest levels of CO emissions,
so let’s get on with it. And let’s make sure we have a serious data set for this
serious problem so that we can track our progress.
Looking for the data after my conversation with Al Gore, I was surprised
how difficult it was to find. Thanks to great satellite images, we can track the
North Pole ice cap on a daily basis. This removes any doubt that it is
shrinking from year to year at a worrying speed. So we have good indications
of the symptoms of global warming. But when I looked for the data to track
the cause of the problem—mainly CO emissions—I found surprisingly little.
The per capita GDP growth of countries on Level 4 was being carefully
tracked, with new official numbers released on a quarterly basis. But CO
emissions data was being published only once every two years. So I started
provoking the Swedish government to do better. In 2009, I started to lobby for
quarterly publication of greenhouse gas data: If we cared about it, why
weren’t we measuring it? How could we claim to be taking this problem
seriously if we weren’t even tracking our progress?

I am very proud that, since 2014, Sweden now tracks quarterly greenhouse
gas emissions (the first and still the only country to do so). This is Factfulness
in action. Statisticians from South Korea recently visited Stockholm to learn
how they could do the same.
Climate change is way too important a global risk to be ignored or denied,
and the vast majority of the world knows that. But it is also way too important
to be left to sketchy worst-case scenarios and doomsday prophets.
When you are called to action, sometimes the most useful action you can
take is to improve the data.

A Convenient Fear

Still, the volume on climate change keeps getting turned up. Many activists,
convinced it is the only important global issue, have made it a practice to
blame everything on the climate, to make it the single cause of all other global
problems.

They grab at the immediate shocking concerns of the day—the war in
Syria, ISIS, Ebola, HIV, shark attacks, almost anything you can imagine—to
increase the feeling of urgency about the long-term problem. Sometimes the
claims are based on strong scientific evidence, but in many cases they are farfetched, unproven hypotheses. I understand the frustrations of those
struggling to make future risks feel concrete in the present. But I cannot agree
with their methods.

Most concerning is the attempt to attract people to the cause by inventing
the term “climate refugees.” My best understanding is that the link between
climate change and migration is very, very weak. The concept of climate
refugees is mostly a deliberate exaggeration, designed to turn fear of refugees
into fear of climate change, and so build a much wider base of public support
for lowering CO emissions.

When I say this to climate activists they often tell me that invoking fear and
urgency with exaggerated or unsupported claims is justified because it is the
only way to get people to act on future risks. They have convinced themselves
that the end justifies the means. And I agree that it might work in the short
term. But. Crying wolf too many times puts at risk the credibility and reputation of
serious climate scientists and the entire movement. With a problem as big as
climate change, we cannot let that happen. Exaggerating the role of climate
change in wars and conflicts, or poverty, or migration, means that the other
major causes of these global problems are ignored, hampering our ability to
take action against them. We cannot get into a situation where no one listens
anymore. Without trust, we are lost.

And hotheaded claims often entrap the very activists who are using them.
The activists defend them as a smart strategy to get people engaged, and then
forget that they are exaggerating and become stressed and unable to focus on
realistic solutions. People who are serious about climate change must keep
two thoughts in their heads at once: they must continue to care about the
problem but not become victims of their own frustrated, alarmist messages.
They must look at the worst-case scenarios but also remember the uncertainty
in the data. In heating up others, they must keep their own brains cool so that
they can make good decisions and take sensible actions, and not put their
credibility at risk.

Ebola

I described in chapter 3 how, in 2014, I was too slow to understand the
dangers of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. It was only when I saw that the
trend line was doubling that I understood. Even in this most urgent and fearful
of situations though, I was determined to try to learn from my past mistakes,
and act on the data, not on instinct and fear.

The numbers behind the official World Health Organization and the US
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) “suspected cases” curve
were far from certain. Suspected cases means cases that are not confirmed.
There were all kinds of issues: for example, people who at some point had
been suspected of having Ebola but who, it turned out, had died from some
other cause were still counted as suspected cases. As fear of Ebola increased,
so did suspicion, and more and more people were “suspected.” As the normal
health services staggered under the weight of dealing with Ebola and
resources had to move away from treating other life-threatening conditions,
more and more people were dying from non-Ebola causes. Many of these
deaths were also treated as “suspect.” So the rising curve of suspected cases
got more and more exaggerated and told us less and less about the trend in
actual, confirmed cases.

If you can’t track progress, you don’t know whether your actions are
working. So when I arrived at the Ministry of Health in Liberia, I asked how
we could get a picture of the number of confirmed cases. I learned within a
day that blood samples were being sent to four different labs, and their
records, in long and messy Excel spreadsheets, were not being combined. We
had hundreds of health-care workers from across the world flying in to take
action, and software developers constantly coming up with new, pointless
Ebola apps (apps were their hammers and they were desperate for Ebola to be
a nail). But no one was tracking whether the action was working or not.
With permission, I sent the four Excel spreadsheets home to Ola in
Stockholm, who spent 24 hours cleaning and combining them by hand, and
then carrying out the same procedure one more time to make sure the strange
thing he saw wasn’t a mistake. It wasn’t. When a problem seems urgent the
first thing to do is not to cry wolf, but to organize the data. To everybody’s
surprise, the data came back showing that the number of confirmed cases had
reached a peak two weeks earlier and was now dropping. The number of
suspected cases kept increasing. Meanwhile, in reality, the Liberian people
had successfully changed their behavior, eliminating all unnecessary body
contact. There was no shaking hands and no hugging. This, and the pedantic
obedience to strict hygiene measures being imposed in stores, public
buildings, ambulances, clinics, burial sites, and everywhere else was already
having the desired effect. The strategy was working, but until the moment Ola
sent me the curve, nobody knew. We celebrated and then everybody
continued their work, encouraged to try even harder now that they knew what
they were doing was actually working.

I sent the falling curve to the World Health Organization and they
published it in their next report. But the CDC insisted on sticking to the rising
curve of “suspected cases.” They felt they had to maintain a sense of urgency
among those responsible for sending resources. I understand they were acting
from the best of intentions, but it meant that money and other resources were
directed at the wrong things. More seriously, it threatened the long-term
credibility of epidemiological data. We shouldn’t blame them. A long jumper
is not allowed to measure her own jumps. A problem-solving organization
should not be allowed to decide what data to publish either. The people trying
to solve a problem on the ground, who will always want more funds, should
not also be the people measuring progress. That can lead to really misleading
numbers.

It was data—the data showing that suspected cases were doubling every
three weeks—that made me realize how big the Ebola crisis was. It was also
data—the data showing that confirmed cases were now falling—that showed
me that what was being done to fight it was working. Data was absolutely
key. And because it will be key in the future too, when there is another
outbreak somewhere, it is crucial to protect its credibility and the credibility
of those who produce it. Data must be used to tell the truth, not to call to
action, no matter how noble the intentions.

Urgent! Read This Now!

Urgency is one of the worst distorters of our worldview. I know I probably
said that about all the other dramatic instincts too, but I think maybe this one
really is special. Or perhaps they all come together in this one. The
overdramatic worldview in people’s heads creates a constant sense of crisis
and stress. The urgent “now or never” feelings it creates lead to stress or
apathy: “We must do something drastic. Let’s not analyze. Let’s do
something.” Or, “It’s all hopeless. There’s nothing we can do. Time to give
up.” Either way, we stop thinking, give in to our instincts, and make bad
decisions.

The Five Global Risks We Should Worry About

I do not deny that there are pressing global risks we need to address. I am not
an optimist painting the world in pink. I don’t get calm by looking away from
problems. The five that concern me most are the risks of global pandemic,
financial collapse, world war, climate change, and extreme poverty. Why is it
these problems that cause me most concern? Because they are quite likely to
happen: the first three have all happened before and the other two are
happening now; and because each has the potential to cause mass suffering
either directly or indirectly by pausing human progress for many years or
decades. If we fail here, nothing else will work. These are mega killers that
we must avoid, if at all possible, by acting collaboratively and step-by-step.

(There is a sixth candidate for this list. It is the unknown risk. It is the
probability that something we have not yet even thought of will cause terrible
suffering and devastation. That is a sobering thought. While it is truly
pointless worrying about something unknown that we can do nothing about,
we must also stay curious and alert to new risks, so that we can respond to
them.)

Global Pandemic

The Spanish flu that spread across the world in the wake of the First World
War killed 50 million people—more people than the war had, although that
was partly because the populations were already weakened after four years of
war. As a result, global life expectancy fell by ten years, from 33 to 23, as you
can see from the dip in the curve here. Serious experts on infectious diseases
agree that a new nasty kind of flu is still the most dangerous threat to global
health. The reason: flu’s transmission route. It flies through the air on tiny
droplets. A person can enter a subway car and infect everyone in it without
them touching each other, or even touching the same spot. An airborne
disease like flu, with the ability to spread very fast, constitutes a greater threat
to humanity than diseases like Ebola or HIV AIDS. Protecting ourselves in
every possible way from a virus that is highly transmissible and ignores every
type of defense is worth the effort, to put it mildly.

The world is more ready to deal with flu than it has been in the past, but
people on Level 1 still live in societies where it can be difficult to intervene
rapidly against an aggressively spreading disease. We need to ensure that
basic health care reaches everyone, everywhere, so that outbreaks can be
discovered more quickly. And we need the World Health Organization to
remain healthy and strong to coordinate a global response.

Financial Collapse

In a globalized world, the consequences of financial bubbles are devastating.
They can crash the economies of entire countries and put huge numbers of
people out of work, creating disgruntled citizens looking for radical solutions.
A really large bank collapse could be way worse than the global eruption that
started with the US housing loan crash in 2009. It could crash the entire
global economy.

Since even the best economists in the world failed to predict the last crash
and fail year on year to predict the recovery from it—because the system is
too complicated for accurate predictions—there is no reason to suppose that
because no one is predicting a crash, it will not happen. If we had a simpler
system there might be some chance of understanding it and working out how
to avoid future collapses.

World War III

My whole life I have done all I can to establish relations with people in other
countries and cultures. It’s not only fun but also necessary to strengthen the
global safety net against the terrible human instinct for violent retaliation and
the worst evil of all: war.

We need Olympic Games, international trade, educational exchange
programs, free internet—anything that lets us meet across ethnic groups and
country borders. We must take care of and strengthen our safety nets for
world peace. Without world peace, none of our sustainability goals will be
achievable. It’s a huge diplomatic challenge to prevent the proud and
nostalgic nations with a violent track record from attacking others now that
they are losing their grip on the world market. We must help the old West to
find a new way to integrate itself peacefully into the new world.

Climate Change

It is not necessary to look only at the worst-case scenario to see that climate
change poses an enormous threat. The planet’s common resources, like the
atmosphere, can only be governed by a globally respected authority, in a
peaceful world abiding by global standards.
This can be done: we did it already with ozone depleters and with lead in
gasoline, both of which the world community reduced to almost zero in two
decades. It requires a strong, well-functioning international community (to be
clear, I am talking about the UN). And it requires some sense of global
solidarity toward the needs of different people on different income levels. The
global community cannot claim such solidarity if it talks about denying the 1
billion people on Level 1 access to electricity, which would add almost
nothing to overall emissions. The richest countries emit by far the most CO
and must start improving first before wasting time pressuring others.

Extreme Poverty

The other risks I have mentioned are highly probable scenarios that would
bring unknown levels of future suffering. Extreme poverty isn’t really a risk.
The suffering it causes is not unknown, and not in the future. It’s a reality. It’s
misery, day to day, right now. It is also where Ebola outbreaks come from,
because there are no health services to encounter them at an early stage; and
where civil wars start, because young men desperate for food and work, and
with nothing to lose, tend to be more willing to join brutal guerrilla
movements. It’s a vicious circle: poverty leads to civil war, and civil war
leads to poverty. The civil conflicts in Afghanistan and central Africa mean
that all other sustainability projects in those places are on hold. Terrorists hide
in the few remaining areas of extreme poverty. When rhinos are stuck in the
middle of a civil war, it’s much more difficult to save them.
Today, a period of relative world peace has enabled a growing global
prosperity. A smaller proportion of people than ever before is stuck in extreme
poverty. But there are still 800 million people left. Unlike with climate
change, we don’t need predictions and scenarios. We know that 800 million
are suffering right now. We also know the solutions: peace, schooling,
universal basic health care, electricity, clean water, toilets, contraceptives, and
microcredits to get market forces started. There’s no innovation needed to end
poverty. It’s all about walking the last mile with what’s worked everywhere
else. And we know that the quicker we act, the smaller the problem, because
as long as people remain in extreme poverty they keep having large families
and their numbers keep increasing. Providing these necessities of a decent
life, quickly, to the final billion is a clear, fact-based priority.

The hardest to help will be those stuck behind violent and chaotic armed
gangs in weakly governed states. To escape poverty, they will need a
stabilizing military presence of some kind. They will need police officers with
guns and government authority to defend innocent citizens against violence
and to allow teachers to educate the next generation in peace.
Still I’m possibilistic. The next generation is like the last runner in a very
long relay race. The race to end extreme poverty has been a marathon, with
the starter gun fired in 1800. This next generation has the unique opportunity
to complete the job: to pick up the baton, cross the line, and raise its hands in
triumph. The project must be completed. And we should have a big party
when we are done.

Knowing that some things are enormously important is, for me, relaxing.
These five big risks are where we must direct our energy. These risks need to
be approached with cool heads and robust, independent data. These risks
require global collaboration and global resourcing. These risks should be
approached through baby steps and constant evaluation, not through drastic
actions. These risks should be respected by all activists, in all causes. These
risks are too big for us to cry wolf.

I don’t tell you not to worry. I tell you to worry about the right things. I
don’t tell you to look away from the news or to ignore the activists’ calls to
action. I tell you to ignore the noise, but keep an eye on the big global risks. I
don’t tell you not to be afraid. I tell you to stay coolheaded and support the
global collaborations we need to reduce these risks. Control your urgency
instinct. Control all your dramatic instincts. Be less stressed by the imaginary
problems of an overdramatic world, and more alert to the real problems and
how to solve them.