Why is the world better than we imagine in 2019?

We all have a distorted vision of the world in which we live, a world that we should know better if we have the pretension and the will to improve it. This distorted view is due to our instincts to see things worse than they really are. One way to change these reflexes is to stick to the facts alone. Not necessarily easy as our emotions take up so much space.

 

New Year’s Eve is often accompanied by the making of good resolutions. It’s time to change course and reduce all the bad habits we’ve formed.
According to a survey conducted in December 2018 by the Capa agency, 91% of French people say they are starting from a new momentum on January 1st.
Among the good resolutions made, the Top 3 in 2019 gives:
“be less stressed and happier”,
“reduce screens” and
“earn more money”.
However, this poll also indicates that 85% of the French will fail in their objectives…

I don’t want to be one of those fatalistic people who aim too high to please themselves and then give up a few weeks later, for the best of reasons, most often external to them. It’s surprising how we all naturally minimize things or see the dark side of things a priori.

 

Factfulness: in praise of our false and pessimistic view of the world

I recently found some answers in the book “Factfulness” by Hans Rosling, which I would like to share. For Bill Gates, this book is so important that he has just given it to 4 million American students!
A Swedish professor of medicine and statistician, Rosling defends the idea that our vision of the world is most of the time false and far too negative. This fight has become his mission: to fight against this “devastating ignorance” caused by our instincts. To do this, we can use a formidable weapon; systematic consultation of statistical data.
Appalled by people’s lack of knowledge of the true state of the planet, he created the Gapminder Foundation in 2005 to systematically measure this general ignorance. He then compared his measurements with the gigantic sums of data collected by the largest international organizations.

 

Rosling’s Perspective

Rosling believes that we all have a distorted view of the world we live in, a world that we should know better if we have the pretension and the will to improve it. “All the groups of people I interviewed believe that the world is more frightening, more violent, more dramatic than it really is.” And this a priori hides from us what he calls “the secret and silent miracle of human progress”. It is true that the slow progress of social, medical and technological advances makes less “noise” than crises, armed conflicts, epidemics and disasters, natural or not.
Rosling is not an “angelist”. Rather than optimistic, he calls himself a “possibilist”. He knows that progress can be brutally undermined by an uncontrollable pandemic, a generalized war or a monstrous financial crash.

 

16 Terrible Things

In his book, he presents his panorama of the world, which is steadily improving, and he lists in the first place, with figures to back it up, “the sixteen terrible things that are disappearing or practically eradicated”. Among them, forced labor or legal slavery, oil spills, new HIV infections, infant mortality, nuclear weapons, undernourishment, etc.
In addition, he also points to “the wonderful things that have gone better and better”. Among them, the protection of nature, women’s right to vote, childhood cancer remission, access to electricity, girls in primary school, use of the internet, etc.

And yet, when asked “Do you think the world is better, worse or has not changed?” asked a global panel representing 30 countries, a strong majority said it was worse. What pushes us to blacken the picture like this? Rosling obviously blames the media and activists (NGOs, associations) who focus more on negative situations. But there is also something else according to him; these are our instincts!

 

Our instincts are our alerts but also disruptors of vision

It would be difficult for us to change the software of our overdramatized worldview because this distorted view is the consequence of the way our brains have been shaped throughout millions of years of evolution. We have kept deep within us instincts that allowed our ancestors to survive, such as the need for sugar and fat, which were beneficial sources of energy when food was scarce. Sugar and fat make obesity one of the major problems of our time.

All these instincts are obviously useful today to counterbalance our rationality and put emotion in our lives. But uncontrolled, they boost our false vision of the world and prevent us from seeing it as it is. Our negative vision of the state of the world, present or future, is all the more acute as we tend to sublimate the past: “it was better before”. However, overall it was worse.

 

From perspective

It is therefore as if, during major assessments of our world, we forget the facts in order to play only our impressions, calling for an erroneous vision of the future. If we start from the principle that our leaders can sometimes follow the same pattern in their strategic decision-making for the company, we can imagine the consequences for the company. It seems, however, that within the company, through the existence of finance and other rationalizing methods (KPIs in particular), the Roslingian syndrome of “devastating ignorance” is limited. In our interim management business, we see this clearly; At the beginning of the mission, the manager focuses on his observations to quickly draw up a factual inventory and be able to quickly draw his first recommendations to our clients.

As Aldous Huxley reminded us in 1957 in Note on Dogma: “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored”!

 

Benoit DURAND TISNES
Managing Director – Wayden