Sublime

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.

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.

(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?

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

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.

the paradox: the image of a dangerous world has never been broadcast more effectively than it is now, while the world has never been less violent and more safe.

What we should do is stop dividing countries into two groups. It doesn’t make sense anymore. It doesn’t help us to understand the world in a practical way. It doesn’t help businesses find opportunities, and it doesn’t help aid money to find the poorest people.

In order for this planet to have financial stability, peace, and protected natural resources, there’s one thing we can’t do without, and that’s international collaboration, based on a shared and fact-based understanding of the world. The current lack of knowledge about the world is therefore the most concerning problem of all.