'The world has never been less violent and more safe'. Yes, really!

The Black Plague, world wars, the Russian Famine, the Haiti quake, the Great Depression, Donald Trump, Easter Sunday Sri Lanka bombings, the list goes on and on and it's inexhaustible. The history of the world is peppered with disasters of all shapes and sizes that have devastatingly reduced the world's population and, let's face it, made for some sensational headlines.

Whether they get it online, in print, off the pages lining your parakeet's cage or up on the screen while you're waiting for your luggage to appear on the airport conveyor belt, more people are following the news of the day than ever before, even if it is just on Instagram or Facebook - and most people will tell you that it's bad, and getting worse.

And it's not only historical events that have furrowed our brows, the future looks foreboding too. Environmentalists are the new prophets of doom; millions of people languish in poverty; immigration is seen as a huge threat, which leads to bitter political polarisation; the chasm between the rich and poor is widening; truth is dead and nobody quite knows what's up with nuclear weapons - the US caused the deaths of about 200,000 people by using them in World War 2 and since then everybody except SA seems to be secretly hedging their bets - we're the only country to have independently developed and then renounced and dismantled our nuclear weapons.

It's no wonder then, considering all of the above, that conversations around dinner tables, water coolers, in taxis and with your Uber driver turn to despair.

But life is a lot less bleak than we think.

Lately it's become a dinner-table trick in my house to use Hans Rosling's test to challenge the world view of any prospective pessimist who comes for supper (and there are so many).

Rosling is the TED talk phenomenon and professor of international health who wrote the book, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About The World - And Why Things Are Better Than You Think, with his son Ola Rosling and daughter-in-law Anna Rosling Rönnlund.

In the book, the authors play a little game with their readers, submitting to them 13 questions with multiple-choice answers on health, literacy, demographics and poverty.

Here are a few examples:

How did the number of deaths per year from natural disasters change over the last 100 years?

A. More than doubled

B. Remained about the same

C. Decreased to less than half

How many people in the world have some access to electricity?

A. 20%

B. 50%

C. 80%

Worldwide, 30-year-old men have spent 10 years in school on average, how many years have women of the same age spent in school?

A. 9 years

B. 6 years

C. 3 years

Take the rest of the test here, you'll be surprised by the correct answers. 

I did well on this test, but have to admit I was primed to be positive. Most people, even highly educated ones, get a staggeringly low number correct, with responses almost always erring on the negativist side. "The most appalling results came from a group of Nobel laureates and medical researchers," say the authors.

Essentially, what Rosling proves by using reliable statistics and facts is that the world is getting better and better all the time for more and more people. There is less violence, more education, greater opportunities, less destruction from natural disasters, more protection for animals, less disease and less poverty than you think. Climate change is a worry though!

All of my friends and family got most of the answers wrong. Why?

Rosling points to a number of human impulses that encourage a disfigured view of the world - the Gap Instinct that divides the world into "us" and "them"; the Negativity Instinct which prevents the realisation that things are actually getting better; the Fear Instinct that makes us grossly exaggerate modern threats like terrorism, compared to other causes of death, and many others.

He then offers tools to help us overcome them. The 'gap instinct', for example, makes us assume that news stories reflect the most common and representative life experiences, when in actual fact they are the most uncommon, least representative stories of society, and yet our empathetic natures make it seem like the terrible things we read about in the news could happen to us too.

So next time you're feeling like the world is in the doldrums, flip through Rosling's book, you may come across these words:

"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. And here's 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."