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Comment by blocked_again | Hacker News Reader

A lot of people seems to be skeptical about this. There is a wonderful book called Factfullness which is written exactly for this kind of audience. In his book, Rosling suggests the vast majority of human beings are wrong about the state of the world. He believes his test subjects think the world is poorer, less healthy, and more dangerous than it is. Bill gates sponsored this book for all the students graduating from college and I can exactly see why by going through this thread.

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I've been driving around Africa for over 2 years now. 25 countries in West and Southern Africa.

There is a lot more development, infrastructure, happiness and success here than the majority of "First Worlders" have any notion of. Even when I tell my family directly they don't really believe me.

4G Internet, chip n pin (or contactless) Credit card payments, multi lane freeways, high rise buildings and of course electricity and drinking water. That's not just South Africa either, all of those exist in Rep. Congo, Nigeria, Cameroon, Mali, Zambia just to name a few examples of where people think of "poverty".

I have come to the conclusion that anyone who hasn't actually set food on this continent (and ventured outside a guided "safari") has no way to discover the truth about this place. There is no media outlet that actual portrays an accurate picture, I have never even seen one that gets close.

I’m an African, I’ve lived all over the continent (until very recently). What you say is correct. By many metrics life has improved, and that is to be celebrated. But internally, I’m a bit conflicted because for sure this development has also come at a cost: (1) some of us now have electricity, but we’ve poisoned our city air, (ii) some of us have running water, but we’ve destroyed our watersheds and the severity of droughts is increasing, (iii) we have better roads (thanks China!), but we’re extensifying our farm land into forest because we’ve been caning our soils, (iv) we’ve got 4g and mobile money, but man, our leaders still brutalize us if we step out of line.

In conclusion, I don’t dispute what you say, there is a great deal of wonderful progress on the continent, but the narrative should not be either/or, and of course varies by country, but it’s neither dystopian famine, or development utopia.

I agree with you 100%.

I certainly am not pro-development at all costs. Heck, I choose to live in the Yukon precisely because it's not Vancouver or Toronto.

I hope "Africa" can see what the West has done, learn from it, and do a better job instead of just blindly going down the same path and screwing things up in the same ways.

It seems as if the onset of development is always coupled with horrible environmental problems. Another 20 years in the future, Africa will have more money to mitigate them.

The gyst of Grantham’s essay which I posted below (also at the bottom of this comment), throws into question that optimism. With evidence, Grantham demonstrates the possibility that a nexus of climate change, soil degradation and population growth threatens Africa’s development trajectory. My view is that this will happen within 20 years as banks pull credit lines from farmers at risk of weather shock. Indeed this is already happening and farmer’s production goes off a cliff when they can’t get loans for good seed and fertiliser.

I don’t write this because I’m a doom and gloom merchant. It’s because we need to get real about investing sufficiently to course correct.

Edit: here’s Grantham’s essay:

https://www.gmo.com/docs/default-source/research-and-comment...

The only ones that get close are the ones on the ground. With the exception of Congo (French speaking), nearly every major city has an English language newspaper online. Yes, they are heavily biased, but the headlines give one at least some degree of information about what is going on. Twitter is also a goldmine for getting a view of Africa, grisly as that can be (municipalities will livestream corporal punishment at times). I tend to use: http://www.congoindependant.com/ , https://dailytimes.ng/category/news/ , https://dailynews.co.tz/tags/local.aspx , https://twitter.com/chismaiocity?lang=en (example, some NSFL content there recently, fyi) , and https://www.aljazeera.com/ (better than BBC at least) .

Related: Some fun questions I like to lead with when discussing Africa and the coming miracle there are:

Where is the Great Wall of Africa/Nigeria? Hint: It's not on dry land ;)

In numbers of Californias, how many people will live in Kinshasa by 2099?

How fast is the bullet train from Nairobi to Mombasa? Who financed it?

I can believe that. Among those people in the west who even think about it, many are vested in the idea of African nations being hopelessly impoverished.

I have found it to be so ingrained in people it's like an automatic response. The TV ads with all the starving "African" children of the 80s and 90s have sunk in, and stuck. Convincing people otherwise will be a herculean task.

> There is a lot more development, infrastructure, happiness and success here than the majority of "First Worlders" have any notion of.

For ages, I've been trying to think of way to monetize this ignorance (or information asymmetry, if you're feeling generous). The only advantage I know is that this ignorance results is lack of first-world competition, which can be huge advantage

Rosling, Pinker and Gates are right to point out that there have been absolute improvements in living standards across the globe.

However as Jeremy Grantham (the British Warren Buffet) warns, these current improvements may have been bought at the expense of future losses as we have destabilized the climate and mined the soils to achieve the gains of recent years.

Grantham projects 40% loss in soil productivity in a much more populated world.

This is not to knock these fantastic advances, but we now need to double down on ensuring they are sustainable.

Here’s Grantham’s paper. It’s a long but fascinating and wel-written read.

https://www.gmo.com/docs/default-source/research-and-comment...

Added to my reading list. But I do find something interesting about your synopsis. Something that Rosling touched on in his book as well. And that is that people from traditionally developed countries look at the more recently developed countries and can only seem to point out that they developed at the expense of the environment...by burning coal, mining the earth, etc. conveniently forgetting that their own country previously did, and still does, all those same things! We look at CO2 production of China and India and its way more than say, the US. But if you look at it per capita it’s still nowhere near the US.

I can only speak for myself (originally from a developing country), but I would not have overlooked that developed nations spent down their natural capital to achieve their modern prosperity. Where did all the trees in Scotland go? I can obviously only speak for myself, but I wonder if it’s a strawman argument.

Re CO2 production, as per Grantham’s paper, there is a radical increase in renewable energy supply taking place. It still only gets us 1/3 of the way to avoiding 2 degree warming.

As a professional in the media field, I think I have an idea of who’s the first offender in propagating a doomier world view

That's... great. Any chance you want to share that idea with us?

I’m guessing he means ‘the media’

Well I thought it was quite obvious, but yes. It’s us. As everyone knows, fear sells. Nice good stories about how much better off we are now? Mmm, not so much. This doesn’t mean that huge problems don’t exist in the world. We have the duty to report on them. I personally try to do things differently than this, and I cover tech, so it’s easier and more neutral. If anything good stories about tech and progress still sell. I feel very detached from the trends of my industry, and so do many colleagues of mine with no power to take policy or business decisions.

There seem to be a lot more natural disasters than there used to be.

- Is this because better communications makes them better reported?

- or are there really more natural disasters?

I would suspect the former. There are so many 24/7 news/weather outlets that need to fill air time and draw in viewers with something. Natural disasters are easy ratings.

30+ years ago (pre-CNN), an earthquake in Jakarta, or a typhoon reaching Thailand might get a blurb on an inner page of the NY Times. Those events certainly wouldn't have something like Weather Channel reporters on site pretending to brace themselves in the wind to dramatize the shot...

Beyond "if it bleeds it reads" media reporting, we now have exponentially more ways to observe the occurrence of natural disasters globally than we did even 20 years ago. Statistically these things should probably be observed and compared over climatological and geological scales before we can determine if there are abnormally more or less natural disasters.

I find this similar to how the over-reporting of child abductions and other black swan crimes led to helicopter parenting. Hyper awareness of every single one of these events, rare though they may be statistically, gives the appearance of "a lot more".

I would say both, to some extent. It appears that climate change is driving more extreme weather events such as hurricanes. And when natural disasters do occur, it's a lot easier to report on them when people almost anywhere on the planet can provide a video of it.

I suspect the effect of natural disasters is also greater because of more people. A larger global population means more people are likely to be in the vicinity of natural phenomena, and higher population density means more people can potentially get into trouble at one time.

Can you point to some graphs/data to support your claim regarding more extreme weather? There doesn't seem to be much actual evidence of that according to https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica... which says:

    Despite the apparent increases in tropical cyclone
    activity in recent years, shown in Figures 2 and 3,
    changes in observation methods over time make it 
    difficult to know whether tropical storm activity has 
    actually shown an increase over time.

And this survey (https://www.omicsonline.org/open-access/trends-in-extreme-we...) says

    It is therefore surprising to discover that by all the 
    various real world data considered here, the weather in 
    the first half of the 20th century was, if anything, 
    more extreme than in the second half. I have not found 
    any data, including in SREX, that contradicts these 
    trends. Furthermore there are no signs of this trend 
    changing (i.e. lessening and reversing) in recent years."

Sure. This seems like a good summary: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate-guide/climate/what-affe...

One of your links refers to hurricane activity, where there seems to be less evidence of links with climate change.

You forgot 3

- lots more people, so if there is a natural disaster, someone is going to be there to be affected by it

Rosling covers that pretty well in the book also.

I am a huge fan of Rosling and just finished his book. He doesn't just suggest/believe that people are systematically wrong (worse than random!), he measured it.

For most people the problem is making the difference between poverty and extreme poverty. They draw the line below which differences stop mattering a lot higher. Below a certain quality of life level it's hard for them to imagine anything else can make a significant difference for the worse... or extreme.

Rosling does a great job in the book to drive this point home. He has a logarithmic scale centered on 2, 8, 16, and 64$ a day, and shows just how much of an improvement in life it is to go from 2 to 8. It means a massive drop in child mortality, access to health care, small families, educated children, etc....

One of my favourite talks is Rosling on washing machines. He makes the case that to have washing machines is a good indicator of middle class as it frees up a lot of time that can be spent well in education and quality of life improvements (payed jobs, home improvement and so on). The availability of washing machines in developing nations has risen dramatically over the last decades. There is now a huge bulge of people around the median world income, and the tail-end is getting smaller, i.e. between the world's poor and middle class the inequality seems to be shrinking actually. It's only the super-rich that appear to be out of control.

I had a maid in Thailand who did laundry for us, and her favorite person in the world was a previous employer who found and provided a washing machine.

I haven't yet read the book, but I recently heard opposing statistics that washing machines don't necessarily free up much time, but they dramatically increase the amount of laundry done and expected cleanliness of clothing. (Jevons paradox)

I suspect the truth is mixed, and that at lower income levels, it probably saves a lot of time, and at higher income levels, "consumption" of clean clothing dominates.

I've heard similar reports. Hoovers (vacuum cleaners) mean fitted carpets rather than a rug you take out and shake off, or mopped floors, so time savings get eaten up. But "luxury" levels increase.

Probably yes. In a culture with 8 kids per family on average the time saving must be huge, but once you are at 2 kids per family (e.g. India now btw.!) it becomes more a quality of life thing.

You shouldn't be surprised about it. Public perception of all non-newsworthy stuff (and good news are not newsworthy, only creepy ones are) is mostly formed in schools, so it is late by about as much as the average person is past his or her school graduation, i.e. now it is stuck in mid-1990s. Mostly reflecting reality of that day.

He also has done a lecture about the same

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E

I second this, Factfulness is a must read and is what I immediately thought of when I saw this headline. It’s crazy how wrong I was about the state and direction of the world.

https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$chart-type=bubbles puts a vizualisation on the data backing this up - there's a lot of fascinating statistics to look at.

Amazon is telling me this book won't be released until April next year. Are you from the future?

Released April 3 this year according to Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/Factfulness-Reasons-World-Things-Bett...

You can get it now in the UK...

indeed and pay more for the kindle version than hardcover, which is pretty surprising to say the least (I do realize that it's an offer but still)

" He believes his test subjects think the world is poorer, less healthy, and more dangerous than it is" People aren't idiots, they aren't wrong. Its Rosling who is wrong. Rosling is a propaganda machine for the crony capitalists who have destroyed nations in middle east and Asia, continue to do so even in "oh so rich" United States. After a century of decolonization and continuing war in the middle east, and palestine for oil and natural gas, Rosling is just telling us its getting better. Thank god!

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