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Hans Rosling: I'm going to ask you

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three multiple choice questions.

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Use this device. Use this device to answer.

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The first question is, how did the number

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of deaths per year

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from natural disaster,

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how did that change during the last century?

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Did it more than double,

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did it remain about the same in the world as a whole,

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or did it decrease to less than half?

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Please answer A, B or C.

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I see lots of answers. This is much
faster than I do it at universities.

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They are so slow. They keep
thinking, thinking, thinking.

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Oh, very, very good.

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And we go to the next question.

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So how long did women 30 years old

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in the world go to school:

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seven years, five years or three years?

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A, B or C? Please answer.

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And we go to the next question.

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In the last 20 years, how did the percentage

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of people in the world

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who live in extreme poverty change?

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Extreme poverty — not having 
enough food for the day.

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Did it almost double,

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did it remain more or less the same,

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or did it halve?

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A, B or C?

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Now, answers.

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You see,

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deaths from natural disasters in the world,

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you can see it from this graph here,

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from 1900 to 2000.

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In 1900, there was about half a million people

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who died every year from natural disasters:

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floods, earthquakes, volcanic 
eruption, whatever, droughts.

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And then, how did that change?

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Gapminder asked the public in Sweden.

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This is how they answered.

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The Swedish public answered like this:

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Fifty percent thought it had doubled,

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38 percent said it's more or less the same,

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12 said it had halved.

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This is the best data from the disaster researchers,

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and it goes up and down,

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and it goes to the Second World War,

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and after that it starts to fall and it keeps falling

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and it's down to much less than half.

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The world has been much, much more capable

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as the decades go by

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to protect people from this, you know.

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So only 12 percent of the Swedes know this.

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So I went to the zoo and I asked the chimps.

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(Laughter) (Applause)

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The chimps don't watch the evening news,

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so the chimps,

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they choose by random, so the
Swedes answer worse than random.

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Now how did you do?

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That's you.

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You were beaten by the chimps.

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(Laughter)

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But it was close.

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You were three times better than the Swedes,

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but that's not enough.

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You shouldn't compare yourself to Swedes.

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You must have higher ambitions in the world.

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Let's look at the next answer here: women in school.

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Here, you can see men went eight years.

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How long did women go to school?

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Well, we asked the Swedes like this,

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and that gives you a hint, doesn't it?

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The right answer is probably the one

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the fewest Swedes picked, isn't it?

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(Laughter)

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Let's see, let's see. Here we come.

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Yes, yes, yes, women have almost caught up.

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This is the U.S. public.

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And this is you. Here you come.

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Ooh.

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Well, congratulations, you're
twice as good as the Swedes,

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but you don't need me —

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So how come? I think it's like this,

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that everyone is aware that there are countries

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and there are areas

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where girls have great difficulties.

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They are stopped when they go to school,

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and it's disgusting.

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But in the majority of the world,

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where most people in the world live,

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most countries, girls today go to school

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as long as boys, more or less.

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That doesn't mean that gender equity is achieved,

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not at all.

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They still are confined to terrible, terrible limitations,

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but schooling is there in the world today.

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Now, we miss the majority.

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When you answer, you answer
according to the worst places,

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and there you are right, but you miss the majority.

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What about poverty?

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Well, it's very clear that poverty here

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was almost halved,

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and in U.S., when we asked the public,

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only five percent got it right.

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And you?

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Ah, you almost made it to the chimps.

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(Laughter) (Applause)

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That little, just a few of you!

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There must be preconceived ideas, you know.

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And many in the rich countries,

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they think that oh, we can never end extreme poverty.

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Of course they think so,

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because they don't even know what has happened.

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The first thing to think about the future

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is to know about the present.

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These questions were a few of the first ones

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in the pilot phase of the Ignorance Project

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in Gapminder Foundation that we run,

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and it was started, this project, last year

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by my boss, and also my son, Ola Rosling. (Laughter)

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He's cofounder and director,

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and he wanted, Ola told me

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we have to be more systematic

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when we fight devastating ignorance.

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So already the pilots reveal this,

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that so many in the public score worse than random,

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so we have to think about preconceived ideas,

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and one of the main preconceived ideas

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is about world income distribution.

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Look here. This is how it was in 1975.

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It's the number of people on each income,

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from one dollar a day —

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(Applause)

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See, there was one hump here,

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around one dollar a day,

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and then there was one hump here

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somewhere between 10 and 100 dollars.

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The world was two groups.

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It was a camel world, like a camel with two humps,

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the poor ones and the rich ones,

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and there were fewer in between.

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But look how this has changed:

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As I go forward, what has changed,

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the world population has grown,

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and the humps start to merge.

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The lower humps merged with the upper hump,

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and the camel dies and we have a dromedary world

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with one hump only.

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The percent in poverty has decreased.

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Still it's appalling

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that so many remain in extreme poverty.

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We still have this group, almost a billion, over there,

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but that can be ended now.

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The challenge we have now

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is to get away from that,
understand where the majority is,

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and that is very clearly shown in this question.

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We asked, what is the percentage of the world's

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one-year-old children who have got those

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basic vaccines against measles and other things

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that we have had for many years:

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20, 50 or 80 percent?

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Now, this is what the U.S.
public and the Swedish answered.

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Look at the Swedish result:

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you know what the right answer is.

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(Laughter)

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Who the heck is a professor of
global health in that country?

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Well, it's me. It's me.

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(Laughter)

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It's very difficult, this. It's very difficult.

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(Applause)

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However, Ola's approach

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to really measure what we know made headlines,

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and CNN published these results on their web

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and they had the questions there, millions answered,

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and I think there were about 2,000 comments,

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and this was one of the comments.

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"I bet no member of the media
passed the test," he said.

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So Ola told me, "Take these devices.

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You are invited to media conferences.

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Give it to them and measure what the media know."

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And ladies and gentlemen,

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for the first time, the informal results

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from a conference with U.S. media.

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And then, lately, from the European Union media.

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(Laughter)

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You see, the problem is not that people

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don't read and listen to the media.

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The problem is that the
media doesn't know themselves.

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What shall we do about this, Ola?

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Do we have any ideas?

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(Applause)

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Ola Rosling: Yes, I have an idea, but first,

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I'm so sorry that you were beaten by the chimps.

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Fortunately, I will be able to comfort you

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by showing why it was not your fault, actually.

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Then, I will equip you with some tricks

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for beating the chimps in the future.

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That's basically what I will do.

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But first, let's look at why are we so ignorant,

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and it all starts in this place.

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It's Hudiksvall. It's a city in northern Sweden.

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It's a neighborhood where I grew up,

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and it's a neighborhood with a large problem.

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Actually, it has exactly the same problem

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which existed in all the neighborhoods

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where you grew up as well.

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It was not representative. Okay?

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It gave me a very biased view

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of how life is on this planet.

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So this is the first piece of the ignorance puzzle.

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We have a personal bias.

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We have all different experiences

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from communities and people we meet,

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and on top of this, we start school,

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and we add the next problem.

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Well, I like schools,

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but teachers tend to teach outdated worldviews,

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because they learned something
when they went to school,

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and now they describe this world to the students

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without any bad intentions,

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and those books, of course, that are printed

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are outdated in a world that changes.

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And there is really no practice

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to keep the teaching material up to date.

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So that's what we are focusing on.

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So we have these outdated facts

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added on top of our personal bias.

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What happens next is news, okay?

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An excellent journalist knows how to pick

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the story that will make headlines,

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and people will read it because it's sensational.

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Unusual events are more interesting, no?

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And they are exaggerated,

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and especially things we're afraid of.

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A shark attack on a Swedish person

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will get headlines for weeks in Sweden.

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So these three skewed sources of information

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were really hard to get away from.

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They kind of bombard us

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and equip our mind with a lot of strange ideas,

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and on top of it we put the very thing

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that makes us humans, our human intuition.

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It was good in evolution.

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It helped us generalize

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and jump to conclusions very, very fast.

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It helped us exaggerate what we were afraid of,

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and we seek causality where there is none,

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and we then get an illusion of confidence

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where we believe that we are the best car drivers,

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above the average.

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Everybody answered that question,

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"Yeah, I drive cars better."

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Okay, this was good evolutionarily,

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but now when it comes to the worldview,

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it is the exact reason why it's upside down.

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The trends that are increasing are instead falling,

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and the other way around,

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and in this case, the chimps
use our intuition against us,

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and it becomes our weakness instead of our strength.

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It was supposed to be our strength, wasn't it?

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So how do we solve such problems?

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First, we need to measure it,

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and then we need to cure it.

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So by measuring it we can understand

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what is the pattern of ignorance.

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We started the pilot last year,

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and now we're pretty sure that we will encounter

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a lot of ignorance across the whole world,

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and the idea is really to

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scale it up to all domains

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or dimensions of global development,

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such as climate, endangered species, human rights,

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gender equality, energy, finance.

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All different sectors have facts,

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and there are organizations trying to spread

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awareness about these facts.

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So I've started actually contacting some of them,

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like WWF and Amnesty International and UNICEF,

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and asking them, what are your favorite facts

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which you think the public doesn't know?

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Okay, I gather those facts.

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Imagine a long list with, say, 250 facts.

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And then we poll the public

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and see where they score worst.

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So we get a shorter list

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with the terrible results,

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like some few examples from Hans,

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and we have no problem finding these kinds

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of terrible results.

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Okay, this little shortlist, what
are we going to do with it?

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Well, we turn it into a knowledge certificate,

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a global knowledge certificate,

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which you can use, if you're a large organization,

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a school, a university, or maybe a news agency,

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to certify yourself as globally knowledgeable.

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Basically meaning, we don't hire people

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who score like chimpanzees.

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Of course you shouldn't.

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So maybe 10 years from now,

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if this project succeeds,

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you will be sitting in an interview

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having to fill out this crazy global knowledge.

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So now we come to the practical tricks.

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How are you going to succeed?

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There is, of course, one way,

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which is to sit down late nights

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and learn all the facts by heart

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by reading all these reports.

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That will never happen, actually.

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Not even Hans thinks that's going to happen.

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People don't have that time.

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People like shortcuts, and here are the shortcuts.

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We need to turn our intuition into strength again.

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We need to be able to generalize.

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So now I'm going to show you some tricks

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where the misconceptions are turned around

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into rules of thumb.

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Let's start with the first misconception.

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This is very widespread.

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Everything is getting worse.

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You heard it. You thought it yourself.

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The other way to think is, most things improve.

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So you're sitting with a question in front of you

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and you're unsure. You should guess "improve."

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Okay? Don't go for the worse.

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That will help you score better on our tests.

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(Applause)

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That was the first one.

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There are rich and poor

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and the gap is increasing.

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It's a terrible inequality.

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Yeah, it's an unequal world,

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but when you look at the data, it's one hump.

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Okay? If you feel unsure,

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go for "the most people are in the middle."

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That's going to help you get the answer right.

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Now, the next preconceived idea is

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first countries and people need to be very, very rich

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to get the social development

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like girls in school and be ready for natural disasters.

340
00:14:55,510 --> 00:14:57,196
No, no, no. That's wrong.

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Look: that huge hump in the middle

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already have girls in school.

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So if you are unsure, go for the

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"the majority already have this,"

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like electricity and girls in
school, these kinds of things.

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They're only rules of thumb,

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so of course they don't apply to everything,

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but this is how you can generalize.

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Let's look at the last one.

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If something, yes, this is a good one,

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sharks are dangerous.

352
00:15:22,227 --> 00:15:26,626
No — well, yes, but they are not so important

353
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in the global statistics, that is what I'm saying.

354
00:15:29,602 --> 00:15:32,133
I actually, I'm very afraid of sharks.

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00:15:32,133 --> 00:15:34,977
So as soon as I see a question
about things I'm afraid of,

356
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which might be earthquakes, other religions,

357
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maybe I'm afraid of terrorists or sharks,

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anything that makes me feel,

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assume you're going to exaggerate the problem.

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That's a rule of thumb.

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Of course there are dangerous 
things that are also great.

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Sharks kill very, very few.
That's how you should think.

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With these four rules of thumb,

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you could probably answer better than the chimps,

365
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because the chimps cannot do this.

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They cannot generalize these kinds of rules.

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And hopefully we can turn your world around

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and we're going to beat the chimps. Okay?

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(Applause)

370
00:16:19,160 --> 00:16:21,248
That's a systematic approach.

371
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Now the question, is this important?

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00:16:23,812 --> 00:16:26,538
Yeah, it's important to understand poverty,

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extreme poverty and how to fight it,

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and how to bring girls in school.

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When we realize that actually it's
succeeding, we can understand it.

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But is it important for everyone else

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who cares about the rich end of this scale?

378
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I would say yes, extremely important,

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for the same reason.

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If you have a fact-based worldview of today,

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you might have a chance to understand

382
00:16:48,672 --> 00:16:50,426
what's coming next in the future.

383
00:16:50,426 --> 00:16:52,864
We're going back to these two humps in 1975.

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That's when I was born,

385
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and I selected the West.

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That's the current EU countries and North America.

387
00:17:01,416 --> 00:17:04,799
Let's now see how the rest and the West compares

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00:17:04,799 --> 00:17:06,880
in terms of how rich you are.

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These are the people who can afford

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00:17:09,131 --> 00:17:12,709
to fly abroad with an airplane for a vacation.

391
00:17:12,709 --> 00:17:16,017
In 1975, only 30 percent of them lived

392
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outside EU and North America.

393
00:17:18,984 --> 00:17:21,313
But this has changed, okay?

394
00:17:21,313 --> 00:17:26,056
So first, let's look at the change up till today, 2014.

395
00:17:26,056 --> 00:17:27,444
Today it's 50/50.

396
00:17:27,444 --> 00:17:31,125
The Western domination is over, as of today.

397
00:17:31,125 --> 00:17:33,324
That's nice. So what's going to happen next?

398
00:17:33,324 --> 00:17:36,567
Do you see the big hump? Did you see how it moved?

399
00:17:36,567 --> 00:17:42,598
I did a little experiment. I went to the IMF,
International Monetary Fund, website.

400
00:17:42,598 --> 00:17:46,761
They have a forecast for the next 
five years of GDP per capita.

401
00:17:46,761 --> 00:17:49,778
So I can use that to go five years into the future,

402
00:17:49,778 --> 00:17:53,113
assuming the income inequality 
of each country is the same.

403
00:17:53,113 --> 00:17:55,040
I did that, but I went even further.

404
00:17:55,040 --> 00:17:58,218
I used those five years for the next 20 years

405
00:17:58,218 --> 00:18:03,495
with the same speed, just as an 
experiment what might actually happen.

406
00:18:03,495 --> 00:18:04,862
Let's move into the future.

407
00:18:04,862 --> 00:18:10,082
In 2020, it's 57 percent in the rest.

408
00:18:10,082 --> 00:18:13,118
In 2025, 63 percent.

409
00:18:13,118 --> 00:18:22,355
2030, 68. And in 2035, the West is 
outnumbered in the rich consumer market.

410
00:18:22,355 --> 00:18:25,702
These are just projections of 
GDP per capita into the future.

411
00:18:25,702 --> 00:18:28,057
Seventy-three percent of the rich consumers

412
00:18:28,057 --> 00:18:31,675
are going to live outside North America and Europe.

413
00:18:31,675 --> 00:18:35,873
So yes, I think it's a good idea for 
a company to use this certificate

414
00:18:35,873 --> 00:18:39,280
to make sure to make fact-
based decisions in the future.

415
00:18:39,280 --> 00:18:40,756
Thank you very much.

416
00:18:40,756 --> 00:18:43,257
(Applause)

417
00:18:48,184 --> 00:18:50,236
Bruno Giussani: Hans and Ola Rosling!