Rethinking the world by moving from drama to data

Insights|December 18, 2025

The story of global development is far more hopeful than most people think. Extreme poverty has fallen, child mortality has dropped, and most of humanity now lives in middle-income countries. Yet, when people are asked basic questions about the world, their answers are often wildly wrong and overly pessimistic.

At our Stockholm 20-year anniversary celebration conference last week, we heard a talk by Ola Rosling, a Swedish data expert who leads the non-profit Gapminder, which builds tools to promote a fact-based worldview. Ola focuses on testing how people understand global trends and then using statistics to correct the outdated mental pictures we carry from school, news, and stereotypes.

He started with the big picture on poverty. Until around 1990, about 58% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty. Since then, economic growth and better health have slowly pushed people out of that situation. Today, only 9% of people live in extreme poverty, while 73% of the world’s population lives in middle-income countries. Most people are not stuck at the bottom anymore; they work, earn salaries and participate in the world market for the first time in their families’ history. “We actually have something to celebrate,” Ola said.

“The world still has huge problems, but it is not collapsing. Much has already improved, often in ways once thought impossible.”

To show how wrong our mental images are, he described a quiz he has tested in dozens of countries. One of the questions asked what share of people live in extreme poverty. Only 7% of respondents picked the correct answer, which is 9%. Ola pointed out that in every test, humans score worse than monkeys. If you gave the same three-option question to monkeys choosing at random, they would get the right answer about 33% of the time.

Ola argues that this is because we answer with our gut feeling and “drama instincts” rather than with our heads. People care about poverty and do not want to trivialize it, so they choose the most dramatic option: that most of humanity is still poor. The same pattern appears when he asks about other issues. For example, he showed data on child mortality: around 1800, about 43% of children died before age five, today it is around 4% and falling. This is one of the greatest achievements in human history, but almost nobody knows it, and we forget to celebrate it.

A major reason for these misconceptions is how news works. Journalists report true events, but almost always the most dramatic ones: wars, epidemics, disasters, guns, fear and crisis. Positive, gradual changes such as more children in school, rising life expectancy or more tigers in India and Bangladesh rarely become headlines. The result, Ola said, is not mainly fake news, but a “drama-distorted news diet” that leaves people exhausted and hopeless.

Gapminder measures this “perception gap” by comparing what people believe with actual data on basic indicators like electricity, schooling and vaccinations. For many so-called “developing countries,” respondents guess that only about 18% of people have these basics, when the real figure is close to 100%. Ola’s world map shows that about 7 billion people live in countries that are systematically underestimated. He suggested a simple rule of thumb: when you hear about an ex-colony and your gut says, “almost nobody has basic services,” add around 50% to your first guess.

Population trends are another area where our instincts mislead us. To make them easier to remember, Ola turns the world into a simple “PIN code.” Today it is roughly 1–1–1–5: one billion people in the Americas, one billion in Europe, one billion in Africa and five billion in Asia. In the future, almost all additional billions will be in Africa, not in the West. By the end of the century, people in Western countries will be only about 8% of humanity; the remaining 92% will live elsewhere. “Let’s call them ‘the world’ and call ourselves ‘the rest’,” he said. His broader message was clear: these population shifts require a profound re-thinking of where to focus your business, because future growth, markets and opportunities will emerge outside the traditional Western sphere.

He also highlighted how little we know about global power shifts. When Ola asked how many countries collaborate closely with China, people mention North Korea, Iran and Russia and then assume it must be a small group. In fact, China has signed infrastructure and development agreements with 147 countries, many of them in regions Westerners still see only as poor or unstable. This network will shape trade, logistics and markets for decades, whether Europe fully understands it or not.

At the core of his message is a call for humility and curiosity, not shame. Instead of hiding our ignorance, he wants organizations to build a culture where people can safely say, “I had no idea; I was completely wrong,” and then learn together. On our own, our brains tend to focus on drama and exceptions. To get a fair view of the world, we need tools, statistics and habits that push back against those instincts.

Ola’s closing message was simple: the world still has huge problems, but it is not collapsing. Much has already improved, often in ways that were once thought impossible. If we learn to “get the big picture right,” use data instead of old stereotypes, and talk honestly about progress as well as problems, we can give the next generation informed hope.