Contributing Writer: Max Levy | May, 2022
Recently, I read Factfulness by Hans Rosling, which tells of human progress and examines the overdramatic and misinformed worldview that most people embrace. Dr. Rosling, a Swedish physician, statistician, and professor of Health Care at the Karolinska Institute of Medicine brilliantly refutes common misconceptions of our basic worldview, which is often perpetrated by the media and a growing reliance on technology. More specifically, it focuses on what Dr. Rosling calls “The Gap Instinct,” or the tendency to divide everything into two – such as developed and developing countries. Based on the information in the chapter, I came up with a two-question survey that questioned my respondents’ knowledge of current living conditions in Africa. Specifically, it asked multiple-choice questions surrounding the Libyan infant mortality rate and how this has changed over the past 50 years.
A country’s infant mortality rate is universally agreed upon to be very helpful in examining aggregate economic progress; it is widely trusted as a single ratio that can accurately determine health and the availability of health care within a diverse population. Infant mortality rate is so trusted amongst economists that it is often used to broadly determine poverty and socioeconomic status at various levels of status within a community. Countries with higher income levels and less poverty tend to have higher average levels of education amongst the youth resulting in improved health-care services. These services are likely to improve health outcomes independent of income, such as infant mortality (Baird, 2).
Before asking the questions, I provided the surveyees with basic information about Libya, as I wanted them to have a baseline knowledge of the country and the current economic situation if they did not already. Furthermore, I provided them with guidelines to help them understand the purpose of the experiment. The following is what I told them before the survey:
“Hey everyone. Thank you for taking part in my survey! You’re not expected to know the answer to these questions, but try to guess based on your prior knowledge of poverty/development in Africa and the Middle East. To help you out, Libya is a country in Northern Africa. Most of the country lies within the Sahara desert. Libya has one of the highest GDPs per capita out of all countries in Africa. As of 2018, the average lifespan of a Libyan is 76 years old. Please do not look anything up as that defeats the whole purpose.”
Despite giving the surveyees crucial information that exemplified the development of living conditions and the economy in Libya, they performed miserably. Overall, I had 38 people answer my survey.
The correct answer is 11, or the blue portion of the pie chart. Only 36.8% correctly answered 11. As previously mentioned, infant mortality rate is a fascinating statistic that measures all aspects of society. “Like a huge thermometer. Because children are very fragile. There are so many things that can kill them… Their parents and their society manage to protect them from all the dangers that could have killed them: germs, starvation, violence, and so on… It measures the quality of the whole society”(Rosling, 6). The majority of the respondents completely overdramatized how bad living conditions of people in Libya are, overwhelmingly answering with an infant mortality rate of 64/1000, which is akin to the infant mortality rate in some of the poorest countries in the world. Despite giving the respondents multiple facts indicating the development of health care and recent economic success of Libya, their misconstrued worldview still led them to believe that the infant mortality rate was much higher than it actually is.
My next question asked surveyees about how Libya’s infant mortality rate has changed:
The correct answer is 89%, which is represented by the small sliver of orange. Only 2.6%, correctly answered that Libya’s infant mortality rate has decreased by an astounding 89% over the last 50 years. The overwhelming majority held an overdramatic view that since 1970, the living conditions have stayed relatively constant, and therefore the infant mortality rate has only decreased by 25%. This dramatic decrease of 89% is extremely impressive and illustrates the exponential economic growth and development Libya has experienced. Yet, most respondents figured that the disparity in African countries has stayed relatively constant over the past 50 years.
Through my survey and the extensive amount of studies presented in the book, it is obvious that there is a severe misunderstanding among the educated of economic development and progress in foreign countries. Despite the increase in technology and the resulting hyperconnected world we live in, the educated are often unaware of progress and the living conditions in “third-world” countries. What perpetuates our acute misunderstanding? Even when given facts that indicate economic growth and success, people still over-dramatize the abundance of poverty in places like Africa and the Middle East. Why is this?
I firmly believe that the overly pessimistic picture of African economic growth and overall living conditions is drawn from the mainstream media. To obtain larger viewership, media outlets have to focus on stories that grab attention and are emotionally moving. They utilize human natural fears to capture attention. Often, this leads them to report on negative stories – such as death, famine, worsening conditions, disease, etc… – instead of writing on progress.
Likewise, more and more studies have recently been produced that illustrate the importance of headlines to viewership, and how often people only read the headline. A survey from NPR of 1,492 American adults in 2014 “found that 58% did not watch, read, or hear any news beyond the headlines in the previous week.” The result is a domino effect: as more and more citizens read headlines – headlines that are often misguided and disproportionately negative – the educated start to embrace a misguided view of the world. Despite the abundance of information available to the public, this misjudgement is widespread. Furthermore, the way that the average person consumes media leads to unconscious and predictable biases. As previously mentioned, the media uses fear as an attention-grabbing technique, which causes viewers to overestimate the risks and prevalence of the fears that the media plays upon.
To embrace a more accurate worldview, we need to become aware of certain unconscious biases that we often unintentionally adopt. Even with all the world’s imperfections and downfalls that we are constantly reminded of, the world is constantly evolving and progressing to become a safer, healthier, and more adept society.
REFERENCE
Baird, Sarah, Jed Friedman, and Norbert Schady. “AGGREGATE INCOME SHOCKS AND
INFANT MORTALITY IN THE DEVELOPING WORLD.” The Review of Economics and Statistics 93, no. 3 (2011): 847–56.
Davis, Wynne. “Fake or Real? How To Self-Check The News And Get The Facts.” NPR, NPR, 5 Dec. 2016.
Rosling, Hans, Ola Rosling, and Rosling Rönnlund Anna. Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. New York: Flatiron Books, 2018.
“Why Focus On Infant Mortality?” The Association of Maternal & Child Health Programs.
Read the full article at: https://issuu.com/uwequilibrium.com/docs/eq_final_2022/29