I recently started reading a book called “Factfulness” by Hans Rosling.  The book is the kind of book that would appeal to me, but it is also one that more people should read.  I am the type of person, when somebody starts telling me about how nervous they are about flying in an aeroplane, to point out that they are more likely to be struck by lightning in Johannesburg and killed than they are in an aeroplane crash.  I find there is a lot of comfort to be had in statistics. 

Of course, that does not mean you cannot die in a motor accident or being bitten by a shark, but the fact of the matter is there is more chance that lightning will strike you and kill you, especially in Johannesburg.  Most people don’t have any problem playing outside when there is lightning, and I have a number of golfing friends who want to keep playing at that time, because they don’t think anything can happen.  It is bizarre sometimes if you put the same person on an aeroplane and then they think they could have a crash, but they are quite happy to play with lightning striking 500 metres away!  A lot of people also forget basic statistics like believing every second that you count after a lightning strike and before the thunder comes means that it is one kilometre away.  If they looked up the statistics, and I’ve had them in my blog before, it is about 335 metres a second that sound travels, so if it takes 3 seconds for you to hear the thunder, the lightning is only 1 km away and you are in grave danger!  Normally when lightning is within 8 km of a golf course or the thunder is 24 seconds away they get everybody off the golf course, so 1 km is way too close for comfort and you are at risk of being struck at any time.

In any event, I was just giving that as an example of the book, and I will deal with more of it in some follow-up articles, but the long and short of it is that this book basically illustrates, through actual facts and figures, that we are living now in the best times ever.  Sure, bad things still happen and frequently do to good people like you, as Dr Seuss says, but there could not be a better time, in all history, to have been alive than now.  People statistically are richer now than ever before, people face less poverty than ever before, there are less people around the world that are starving than ever before.  Many animals that were endangered 20 or 30 years ago are making great comebacks and the book contracts how we all talk about how things are getting worse, things are bad, etc, but that such talk is ignorant – it is ignorant of the facts and you need to know your facts and your statistics, because if you know your facts and statistics you will be more likely to talk credibly about issues instead of saying how bad things are and how bad they have become when that is not the reality.