Sublime

(By the way, that is a good general principle with statistics: be careful jumping to any conclusions if the differences are smaller than say, roughly, 10 percent.)

how could policy makers and politicians solve global problems if they were operating on the wrong facts?

What I show is mostly just official UN data. As long as people have a worldview that is so much more negative than reality, pure statistics can make them feel more positive.

Just as I have urged you to look behind the statistics at the individual stories, I also urge you to look behind the individual stories at the statistics. The world cannot be understood without numbers. And it cannot be understood with numbers alone.

Step-by-step, year-by-year, the world is improving. Not on every single measure every single year, but as a rule. Though the world faces huge challenges, we have made tremendous progress. This is the fact-based worldview.

Remember: things can be bad, and getting better.

We could fill a whole book with images showing the striking similarities between the lives of people living on the same incomes in different countries, and the huge differences in how people live within countries.

while the world has changed, the worldview has not, at least in the heads of the “Westerners.” Most of us are stuck with a completely outdated idea about the rest of the world.

To understand most of the world’s significant problems we have to look beyond a guilty individual and to the system.