The Times/Daniel Finkelstein: Here's how to make the world a better place

Thursday April 19 2018
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daniel finkelstein
April 18 2018, 12:01am, The Times
Here’s how to make the world a better place

Daniel Finkelstein

We fail to appreciate how much our quality of life has improved — or how to ensure it continues on an upward path
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All these meetings and what’s the point? The UN sets its development targets and now we’ve got all these Commonwealth leaders meeting in London for some more nattering. And we never get anywhere, do we? The plans are just words.

We are where we always were. The developed world and the developing world, North and South, rich and poor. Capitalism works for the few, but not the many and development policies don’t work at all.

If you think like this, you are in the majority. And you are wrong.

Consider this. Hans Rosling was born in Egypt but he was also born in Uppsala. Exceptional as this public health scientist was, he wasn’t delivered in two places nearly 4,000 miles apart. So what do I mean?

When Rosling was born in 1948, Sweden had the national income and many of the social circumstances found today in Egypt. In 1863, when his grandmother was born, it had been like Afghanistan is today; by 1891 it was like Lesotho; by 1921 like Zambia.

It is a simple but powerful observation. Because of economic growth, countries get richer, healthier, better educated, more liberal and more equal. This happens slowly, so much so that we hardly notice, but over time the effect is transformative. As we write about day-to-day political rows and economic setbacks, we often miss the bigger story about how the world is getting better.

Shortly before his death last year, Rosling wrote a book, Factfulness, that summarised the lessons he had learnt dealing with health epidemics and data. Published this month, it is an assault both on ignorance and pessimism.

In years of testing the knowledge of the public, and in particular of highly educated people from medical practitioners to Nobel prize winners, Rosling found that our understanding of the world is not as bad as that of a chimp selecting answers at random. It’s worse.

We are much more pessimistic than is warranted, much less aware of the way the world is improving than we should be, much more aware of individual catastrophes than of global trends.

When he began, Rosling dubbed his data project Gapminder. The idea that there is a rich world and a poor world with a gap in between is simply incorrect, he said. For example, we think of the world divided into two groups: countries with small families where few children die in infancy (the developed world) and those with big families where many children die (the developing world). In 1965 there were many countries in each of these categories, with more in the latter and almost none in the gap between the two.

But now? 85 per cent of mankind lives in developed countries, and only 6 per cent in developing ones. And Rosling adds: “Poor developing countries no longer exist as a distinct group . . . there is no gap. Today most people, 75 per cent, live in middle-income countries. Not poor, not rich, but somewhere in the middle and starting to live a reasonable life.”

The average guess by people who took part in Rosling’s surveys was that 59 per cent of us live in low income countries. The real figure is 9 per cent. And most people think extreme poverty is either stubbornly unchanged over the last twenty years or has actually risen. In fact it has almost halved.

So in 1800, 85 per cent of people lived on less than $2 a day (in 2017 money); in 1966 it had fallen to 50 per cent; in 1997 to 29 per cent and by 2017 to 9 per cent. This is an extraordinary achievement. It means that every day for the past 25 years, the number of people in extreme poverty fell by 137,000.

Big drivers of this change are improvements in public health (antibiotics, sewage systems, vaccines, washing hands before eating) and women’s education. As more women learn to read and write they understand better how to take advantage of public health provision, fewer children die in infancy and the birth rate falls as parents stop having large families as an insurance policy.

So in 1948 women on average gave birth to five children. After 1965 the number started dropping and is now just below 2.5. Population will grow, but largely because of children who will now survive into adulthood.

One consequence will be the rise of Africa. Most people when asked by Rosling about the world’s population place too many people in Europe and the Americas and too few in Africa and Asia. If this is a mistake now, it is an even more mistaken view of the future. By 2100 more than 80 per cent of the world’s population will live in Africa and Asia. And the largest proportion of that increase will be in Africa.

Yes, Africa will have big challenges: climate change, for instance, the short-term dislocation of population growth and the need to overcome tribalism, but everything suggests it will be growing fast and providing new markets full of healthier, wealthier, and better educated workers. An opportunity awaits Britain, with its close ties to Africa through the Commonwealth, to benefit from this after Brexit.

Two broader points arise. The first is that it’s not true to say nothing works, or that all those goals are being set and meetings being held for no purpose. The world is making extraordinary progress. The past five years has been the greatest five-year period in history for the reduction of child mortality. Global capitalism is not a gigantic flop and neither are aid programmes.

Even domestically we tend to look at the world as if nothing changes. But if we go on as we are, then it is quite likely that in 30 years’ time we will be spending twice as much on the NHS and the average salary of an experienced nurse will be more than £60,000. In real terms.

The other point is that none of this is inevitable. The philanthropist and entrepreneur Bill Gates told me yesterday: “The only reason things have improved is because people get upset about things and decide to do something about it.” Malaria is being suppressed because we are distributing bed nets and treating them with new insecticides. It doesn’t happen by itself.

In other words, helping countries improve their governance and public health and opening them up to the rule of law and market exchange works. But not by some sort of magic. Because we act. And to this, as Rosling argues, we first have to understand the world we live in.

daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk

    Africa
    Egypt
    Technology
    Europe

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