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GAPMINDER UPGRADES OUR WORLDVIEW Ola Rosling chairs the Gapminder Foundation, which has a way of presenting facts in an easily accessible and understandable way that has attracted great international attention. With support from the Erling-Persson Foundation they have scaled up their activities further, and are now seeing companies also begin to understand the benefits of fact-checking their worldview.
Gapminder has attracted a great deal of attention. Bill Gates described ‘Factfulness’ as one of the most important books he has read and decided to hand it out free to all US college students in 2018. Can it go any further? Yes, because the fundamental problem remains: people are not keeping up with the rapid changes in the world because the human brain is not particularly well suited to processing data. It means that nearly everyone has a view of the world that is constantly lagging 50–60 years behind the reality. Gapminder is needed for as long as people use inaccurate perceptions or out-of-date facts to u nderstand the present. But it sounds like a more or less impossible task to ‘update the human brain’? It’s largely a matter of psychology. To get across a fact-based worldview you have to have a respectful relationship with the party that is doing the
“Nearly everyone has an image of the world that lags 50–60 years behind the reality.” learning, so to speak. After all, people are unwilling to acknowledge their mistakes. As soon as someone points out ignorance, people do everything possible to defend why there is nothing wrong with being wrong, and why actually they weren’t wrong at all. And so on. That is actually the greatest barrier.
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But aren’t there many who are good at spreading up-to-date facts today? To put it bluntly, I think this is a real problem. It remains because no market force seems to have an incentive to change it. News bodies like CNN or the BBC ought to be able to fix this, because they are communicating with people all the time. Yet they seem to be contributing to cementing things. When we meet journalists from big media companies they are also mistaken about what the world is actually like.
“To get across a factbased worldview you have to have a respectful relationship with the party doing the learning.” So everyone is wrong? If there are any people who are not wrong about the world, it is generally the leaders of international corporations. The big commercial forces, those at the very top of global companies, become successful by being right. They have an incentive. But the rest of society seems to prefer to be wrong about the world. Then they can embellish their own role, cementing former glories. In the past Europe was ahead of everyone else. It feels so good to go round believing that, that we kind of don’t want to hear anything else. In our fixed view of ourselves and the world around us nothing has happened in, say, Africa for many decades.
