Factfulness

Hans starts his presentation on ignorance by conducting a quick poll of the Ted audience. He asks a few multiple choice questions about trends across history. How have deaths from natural disasters changed over the last century? How long has the average 30 year old woman spend in school? How did the percent of people living in extreme poverty change over the last 20 years The actual deaths from natural disasters, for example, dropped from 0.5 million (1900) to 0.1 million (2000). But only 30% of the Ted audience and 12% of Swedish public were correct on this question. To further prove his point about ignorance, Hans presents the results from a third survey group: chimpanzees at the zoo. Simply by choosing at random (33%) they choose the correct answer more often than everyone else. The polling results from the other two questions followed a similar pattern: the trend in education and impoverished people changed for the better while people assumed a negative change. Hans introduces the Ignorance Project, cofounded by him and his son to investigate what the public knows about basic global patterns. In their pilot project, they used these very same questions, along with some others, that were picked up by CNN. CNN asked their readers, what percent of 1 year old children are vaccinated against measles? The correct percentage is 80%, but predictably, the majority thought it was significantly lower. Only 17% of US public and 8% Swedish public were correct. But more surprisingly, 80% of the US media and 92% of the EU Media were wrong as well. The problem, he says, isn't that people don't listen to the media, it's that the media don't know themselves. Hans son, Ola, comes out on to the stage to speak on the second half of their topic: Why are we so ignorant and what can we do about it?