Lessons From Factfulness

Hans Rosling was one of the most recognized and renowned health activists, striving for international awareness on global issues that the world is facing. He dedicated the last part of his life, finishing his magnum opus, 'Factfulness' while being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and spending time for its treatment. Even in this state though, he never gave up and strived for his book till the last moment. He would scribble notes and small amendments all the way till the end of his life, to finalize what he aspired to be a medium "that would help the global audience understand the world better". His book provides a breathtaking perspective on how the world works and how certain things work. Bellow is a small analysis of one of the themes of the book and how it's teaching can propagate to other lessons as well.

Factfulness gives us a series of tools to navigate the bigger landscape of the world, with all the daily studies and statistics that come out and hit us in the face in a constant flow. Many of the news we hear, are only there to promote a certain view that is convenient for one party, even though it may not be of any objective value per se. How many times are good news skipped from the front pages? How many times progress is shoved off before our eyes to cover for the inability to act effectively. There is a whole world in the attempt to understand better these trends and factfulness shows us a better way to navigate them. This article is an attempt to analyze one of its themes and is by no way a strict interpretation or summary of the book.

Thinking in straight lines

People always have the tendency to propagate the current situation to the future as if nothing would ever change. We fill in the blanks with the assumption that things will keep going in the same pattern unless there is an obvious reason to suggest otherwise. And so we look for example at the population charts and scream in agony on the thought that humanity will eventually surpass the whole planet in just a matter of years extinguishing any other sample of life from the surface of the earth.

Currently, there are approximately 8 billion people in the world, when we were just a bit above 6 billion 20 years ago, and 4 billion 55 years back in 1975. From the moment homo sapiens appeared on earth as a separate species at 50.000 BC and all the way to 10.000 BC we only managed to grow to 2 million people. We reached 18 million people by year 5.000 BC with a steady increase of approximately 67,000 people each year, and we kept going in this tempo all the way to 1800 where we reached the milestone of one billion people. This is where things started to change to a much faster acceleration where the population-increase took rapid growth. By the year 1930, we were approximately 2 billion and then every year would bring a substantial difference in the overall number. The projected population by the UN is for people to have reach 10 to 13 by the year 2100.

So based on these facts what would be the expectation for the future of the human population? Are we gonna keep expanding till there is nothing else left on the planet, and for how long will this continue before earth succumbs under the weight?

It turns out that most people will naturally assume the same growth rate as the previous experience has shown and there is a big portion of people that are worried about the effects of overpopulation. In reality though, this assumption is only a misconception and has no basis in reality. Just because there is growth now it doesn't mean there will be growth tomorrow, the same way that the random increase in income does not indicate a constant improvement on ad infinitum.

As it turns out after analysis, we expect people to grow in population with another 3-4 billion and then stabilizing in that size for a much longer period. Watching the statistics more carefully it is obvious that the actual growth rate is actually diminishing with time even though the population may still increase. It is this idea of the actual number growth and lower rate that is giving the impression of extreme numbers when in reality it is getting into a natural equilibrium and is bound to stop at some later point.

The same idea exists in productivity numbers and teams that work on a project. Analysis has shown that adding more people does not necessarily mean an acceleration in the results you are gonna observe even if they are better than you would have with fewer people. For example, once you start with the initial members of a team you may see a rapid increase in the outcome with every new member you add. If you had 3 people doing all the hard work, and you added a fourth one you will see a big difference. And so you will with a fifth or a sixth person.

But it is at some point in time that the more people you add the less growth you are gonna perceive with the results to be diminishing the larger you grow. You may still be getting a positive deviation at least for the foreseeable future even when the rates are just diminishing, but the extra value that comes from the 15th person will be dismal in comparison with the extra value you got from the third person. And in the same way, the extra productivity from the number 40 will be even smaller than that of the 15th. You will just observe the natural rule that the extra weight from all the communication between the members will overcome the ability to do any amount of work at all where every single one of them will have to do just a tiny little part and spend most of his time tuning his work with the rest.

This equalizer comes naturally at most things as they keep grow and there are very rare exceptions that anything will just keep growing on its own forever if left unmanaged. At some point, the difficulty to synchronise our lives is gonna get precedence and block us from having any more children. Also, the effect of poverty, which is one of the main reasons for sustaining big families, is diminishing and is giving way to middle-class households that can maintain their well-being and verify their continuation to the next generations with fewer children. There is no reason any more to have multiple children to help out with the farm labor and child mortality is at much lower levels, which removes the need to have multiple kids as an insurance policy. It is mostly these reasons that played out and affected people towards having big families and none of the cultural or religious ones, that we had projected to this phenomenon till now.

The Limit Of Energy Sources.

It is a natural assumption to think that the energy sources that sustain humanity are gonna be diminished and we are going to be out in a matter of years if we continue to overuse them the way we do now. The natural tendency is once again dictating that what we observe in the span of the last few years is going to continue on in the years to come and it was even I per se that thought we had a serious risk of running out of energy resources eventually. It turns out that this is an instinctive reaction to past observations and is not based on real facts at all.

People have been harnessing the natural sources of energy from the moment they established a scientific method of research. Beginning with the usage of heat they learned to use it in order to boil water and create steam through which they could fuse to moving machines. They took the natural power of the water-force and used it to move mills that could produce hydropower. It wasn't long till more theories emerged in relation to energy, that revealed new areas for sources available. Einstein's theory of relativity is nothing more than an equation of hidden energy. E=mc^2 means that every amount of mass hides a tremendous portion of energetical potential and it wasn't long till this capacity was realized even to our own detriment with the creation of the atomic bomb.

Right now the biggest exploitation of energy comes from fossil fuels. It contributes the biggest share of the electricity we use and modern machinery. So many people are concerned about their potential eradication of it, as they are found in limited amounts in nature, but in reality, humanity has always found a way to discover new sources to use for its needs. The sun alone contains a tremendous amount of energy from which we only use a tiny little percentage for our needs when it all comes for free. In a sense, the industrial revolution is all about learning how to harness energy and managing to transform it from one form to the other.

"The amount of energy stored in all the fossil fuel on earth is negligible compared to the amount that the sun dispenses every day, free of charge. Only a tiny proportion of the sun's energy reaches us, yet it amounts to 3,766,800 exajoules of energy each year. All the world's plants capture only about 3000 of those solar exajoules through the process of photosynthesis." Noah Harari

It's only a deception that the amount of energy around us is limited. In reality, it exists in huge quantities that we have not even begun to capitalize on or learn how to use properly. The example of the sun is only one of the hidden potentials we are missing, not to mention the unlimited energetical resources that are lying in nature like wind and water. It's only a matter of perspective whether we remain attached to the tools we already have or start thinking about new ways to exploit the energy around us.