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Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think Hardcover – April 3, 2018
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INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
“One of the most important books I’ve ever read―an indispensable guide to thinking clearly about the world.” – Bill Gates
“Hans Rosling tells the story of ‘the secret silent miracle of human progress’ as only he can. But Factfulness does much more than that. It also explains why progress is so often secret and silent and teaches readers how to see it clearly.” ―Melinda Gates
"Factfulness by Hans Rosling, an outstanding international public health expert, is a hopeful book about the potential for human progress when we work off facts rather than our inherent biases." - Former U.S. President Barack Obama
Factfulness: The stress-reducing habit of only carrying opinions for which you have strong supporting facts.
When asked simple questions about global trends―what percentage of the world’s population live in poverty; why the world’s population is increasing; how many girls finish school―we systematically get the answers wrong. So wrong that a chimpanzee choosing answers at random will consistently outguess teachers, journalists, Nobel laureates, and investment bankers.
In Factfulness, Professor of International Health and global TED phenomenon Hans Rosling, together with his two long-time collaborators, Anna and Ola, offers a radical new explanation of why this happens. They reveal the ten instincts that distort our perspective―from our tendency to divide the world into two camps (usually some version of us and them) to the way we consume media (where fear rules) to how we perceive progress (believing that most things are getting worse).
Our problem is that we don’t know what we don’t know, and even our guesses are informed by unconscious and predictable biases.
It turns out that the world, for all its imperfections, is in a much better state than we might think. That doesn’t mean there aren’t real concerns. But when we worry about everything all the time instead of embracing a worldview based on facts, we can lose our ability to focus on the things that threaten us most.
Inspiring and revelatory, filled with lively anecdotes and moving stories, Factfulness is an urgent and essential book that will change the way you see the world and empower you to respond to the crises and opportunities of the future.
---
“This book is my last battle in my life-long mission to fight devastating ignorance…Previously I armed myself with huge data sets, eye-opening software, an energetic learning style and a Swedish bayonet for sword-swallowing. It wasn’t enough. But I hope this book will be.” Hans Rosling, February 2017.
- Print length352 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherFlatiron Books
- Publication dateApril 3, 2018
- Dimensions6.3 x 1.25 x 8.4 inches
- ISBN-101250107814
- ISBN-13978-1250107817
- Lexile measure1000L
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“One of the most important books I’ve ever read―an indispensable guide to thinking clearly about the world.” – Bill Gates
“Hans Rosling tells the story of ‘the secret silent miracle of human progress’ as only he can. But Factfulness does much more than that. It also explains why progress is so often secret and silent and teaches readers how to see it clearly.” ―Melinda Gates
"Factfulness by Hans Rosling, an outstanding international public health expert, is a hopeful book about the potential for human progress when we work off facts rather than our inherent biases." - Former U.S. President Barack Obama
“Wonderful… a passionate and erudite message that is all more moving because it comes from beyond the grave… His knack for presentation and delight in statistics come across on every page. Who else would choose a chart of 'guitars per capita' as a proxy for human progress?” ―The Financial Times
“[Factfulness] throws down a gauntlet to doom-and-gloomers in global health by challenging preconceptions and misconceptions [and] is a fabulous read, succinct and lively… This magnificent book ends with a plea for a factual world view. Rosling was optimistic that this outlook will spread, because it is a useful navigational tool in a complex world, and a genuine antidote to negativity and hopelessness.” ―Nature
"Like any good statistician, Rosling uses the tools of his trade (namely, graphs, charts and lots of questionnaires) to argue we're doing too much feeling and not enough thinking when it comes to assessing the world…His goal is to change the way we see the world." ―Business Insider
“In an accessible, almost folksy prose, Rosling identifies various reasons why so many of us have ended up with so many faulty ideas about our world.” ―Booklist
"In Hans Rosling’s hands, data sings. Global trends in health and economics come to vivid life. And the big picture of global development―with some surprisingly good news―snaps into sharp focus." ―TED
"Three minutes with Hans Rosling will change your mind about the world." ―Nature
“If you need a break from the mainstream media message about how the world is falling apart, I can highly recommend this fact-filled and super fun book. In fact, I might even suggest that this book should be the starting place for any kind of discussion about economics, politics, and the state of the world in general.” ―Seeking Alpha
About the Author
Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Hans's son and daughter-in-law,were co-founders of the Gapminder Foundation, and Ola its director from 2005 to 2007 and from 2010 to the present day. After Google acquired the bubble-chart tool called Trendalyzer, invented and designed by Anna and Ola, Ola became head of Google's Public Data Team and Anna the team’s senior user experience (UX) designer. They have both received international awards for their work.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Factfulness
Ten Reasons We're Wrong About The World — And Why Things Are Better Than You Think
By Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling RönnlundFlatiron Books
Copyright © 2018 Factfulness ABAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-250-10781-7
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Author's Note,
Introduction,
CHAPTER ONE: The Gap Instinct,
CHAPTER TWO: The Negativity Instinct,
CHAPTER THREE: The Straight Line Instinct,
CHAPTER FOUR: The Fear Instinct,
CHAPTER FIVE: The Size Instinct,
CHAPTER SIX: The Generalization Instinct,
CHAPTER SEVEN: The Destiny Instinct,
CHAPTER EIGHT: The Single Perspective Instinct,
CHAPTER NINE: The Blame Instinct,
CHAPTER TEN: The Urgency Instinct,
CHAPTER ELEVEN: Factfulness in Practice,
Factfulness Rules of Thumb,
Outro,
Acknowledgments,
APPENDIX: How Did Your Country Do?,
Notes,
Sources,
Biographical Notes,
Index,
About the Authors,
Copyright,
CHAPTER 1
THE GAP INSTINCT
Capturing a monster in a classroom using only a piece of paper
Where It All Started
It was October 1995 and little did I know that after my class that evening, I was going to start my lifelong fight against global misconceptions.
"What is the child mortality rate in Saudi Arabia? Don't raise your hands. Just shout it out." I had handed out copies of tables 1 and 5 from UNICEF's yearbook. The handouts looked dull, but I was excited.
A choir of students shouted in unison: "THIRTY-FIVE."
"Yes. Thirty-five. Correct. This means that 35 children die before their fifth birthday out of every thousand live births. Give me the number now for Malaysia?"
"FOURTEEN," came the chorus.
As the numbers were thrown back at me, I scribbled them with a green pen onto a plastic film on the overhead projector.
"Fourteen," I repeated. "Fewer than Saudi Arabia!"
My dyslexia played a little trick on me and I wrote "Malaisya." The students laughed.
"Brazil?"
"FIFTY-FIVE."
"Tanzania?"
"ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-ONE."
I put the pen down and said, "Do you know why I'm obsessed with the numbers for the child mortality rate? It's not only that I care about children. This measure takes the temperature of a whole society. Like a huge thermometer. Because children are very fragile. There are so many things that can kill them. When only 14 children die out of 1,000 in Malaysia, this means that the other 986 survive. Their parents and their society manage to protect them from all the dangers that could have killed them: germs, starvation, violence, and so on. So this number 14 tells us that most families in Malaysia have enough food, their sewage systems don't leak into their drinking water, they have good access to primary health care, and mothers can read and write. It doesn't just tell us about the health of children. It measures the quality of the whole society.
"It's not the numbers that are interesting. It's what they tell us about the lives behind the numbers," I continued. "Look how different these numbers are: 14, 35, 55, and 171. Life in these countries must be extremely different."
I picked up the pen. "Tell me now how life was in Saudi Arabia 35 years ago? How many children died in 1960? Look in the second column."
"TWO HUNDRED ... and forty two."
The volume dropped as my students articulated the big number: 242.
"Yes. That's correct. Saudi Arabian society has made amazing progress, hasn't it? Child deaths per thousand dropped from 242 to 35 in just 33 years. That's way faster than Sweden. We took 77 years to achieve the same improvement.
"What about Malaysia? Fourteen today. What was it in 1960?"
"Ninety-three," came the mumbled response. The students had all started searching through their tables, puzzled and confused. A year earlier, I had given my students the same examples, but with no data tables to back them up, and they had simply refused to believe what I told them about the improvements across the world. Now, with all the evidence right in front of them, this year's students were instead rolling their eyes up and down the columns, to see if I had picked exceptional countries and tried to cheat them. They couldn't believe the picture they saw in the data. It didn't look anything like the picture of the world they had in their heads.
"Just so you know," I said, "you won't find any countries where child mortality has increased. Because the world in general is getting better. Let's have a short coffee break."
The Mega Misconception That "The World Is Divided in Two"
This chapter is about the first of our ten dramatic instincts, the gap instinct. I'm talking about that irresistible temptation we have to divide all kinds of things into two distinct and often conflicting groups, with an imagined gap — a huge chasm of injustice — in between. It is about how the gap instinct creates a picture in people's heads of a world split into two kinds of countries or two kinds of people: rich versus poor.
It's not easy to track down a misconception. That October evening in 1995 was the first time I got a proper look at the beast. It happened right after coffee, and the experience was so exciting that I haven't stopped hunting mega misconceptions ever since.
I call them mega misconceptions because they have such an enormous impact on how people misperceive the world. This first one is the worst. By dividing the world into two misleading boxes — poor and rich — it completely distorts all the global proportions in people's minds.
Hunting Down the First Mega Misconception
Starting up the lecture again, I explained that child mortality was highest in tribal societies in the rain forest, and among traditional farmers in the remote rural areas across the world. "The people you see in exotic documentaries on TV. Those parents struggle harder than anyone to make their families survive, and still they lose almost half of their children. Fortunately, fewer and fewer people have to live under such dreadful conditions."
A young student in the first row raised his hand. He tilted his head and said, "They can never live like us." All over the room other students nodded in support.
He probably thought I would be surprised. I was not at all. This was the same kind of "gap" statement I had heard many times before. I wasn't surprised, I was thrilled. This was what I had hoped for. Our dialogue went something like this:
ME: Sorry, who do you mean when you say "they"?
HIM: I mean people in other countries.
ME: All countries other than Sweden?
HIM: No. I mean ... the non-Western countries. They can't live like us. It won't work.
ME: Aha! (As if now I understood.) You mean like Japan?
HIM: No, not Japan. They have a Western lifestyle.
ME: So what about Malaysia? They don't have a "Western lifestyle," right?
HIM: No. Malaysia is not Western. All countries that haven't adopted the Western lifestyle yet. They shouldn't. You know what I mean.
ME: No, I don't know what you mean. Please explain. You are talking about "the West" and "the rest." Right?
HIM: Yes. Exactly.
ME: Is Mexico ... "West"?
He just looked at me.
I didn't mean to pick on him, but I kept going, excited to see where this would take us. Was Mexico "the West" and could Mexicans live like us? Or "the rest," and they couldn't? "I'm confused." I said. "You started with 'them and us' and then changed it to 'the West and the rest.' I'm very interested to understand what you mean. I have heard these labels used many times, but honestly I have never understood them."
Now a young woman in the third row came to his rescue. She took on my challenge, but in a way that completely surprised me. She pointed at the big paper in front of her and said, "Maybe we can define it like this: 'we in the West' have few children and few of the children die. While 'they in the rest' have many children and many of the children die." She was trying to resolve the conflict between his mind-set and my data set — in a pretty creative way, actually — by suggesting a definition for how to split the world. That made me so happy. Because she was absolutely wrong — as she would soon realize — and more to the point, she was wrong in a concrete way that I could test.
"Great. Fantastic. Fantastic." I grabbed my pen and leaped into action. "Let's see if we can put the countries in two groups based on how many children they have and how many children die."
The skeptical faces now became curious, trying to figure out what the heck had made me so happy.
I liked her definition because it was so clear. We could check it against the data. If you want to convince someone they are suffering from a misconception, it's very useful to be able to test their opinion against the data. So I did just that.
And I have been doing just that for the rest of my working life. The big gray photocopying machine that I had used to copy those original data tables was my first partner in my fight against misconceptions. By 1998, I had a new partner — a color printer that allowed me to share a colorful bubble graph of country data with my students. Then I acquired my first human partners, and things really picked up. Anna and Ola got so excited by these charts and my idea of capturing misconceptions that they joined my cause, and accidently created a revolutionary way to show hundreds of data trends as animated bubble charts. The bubble chart became our weapon of choice in our battle to dismantle the misconception that "the world is divided into two."
What's Wrong with This Picture?
My students talked about "them" and "us." Others talk about "the developing world" and "the developed world." You probably use these labels yourself. What's wrong with that? Journalists, politicians, activists, teachers, and researchers use them all the time.
When people say "developing" and "developed," what they are probably thinking is "poor countries" and "rich countries." I also often hear "West/rest," "north/south," and "low-income/high-income." Whatever. It doesn't really matter which terms people use to describe the world, as long as the words create relevant pictures in their heads and mean something with a basis in reality. But what pictures are in their heads when they use these two simple terms? And how do those pictures compare to reality?
Let's check against the data. The chart on the next page shows babies per woman and child survival rates for all countries.
Each bubble on the chart represents a country, with the size of the bubble showing the size of the country's population. The biggest bubbles are India and China. On the left of the chart are countries where women have many babies, and on the right are countries where women have few babies. The higher up a country is on the chart, the better the child survival rate in that country. This chart is exactly what my student in the third row suggested as a way of defining the two groups: "us and them," or "the West and the rest." Here I have labeled the two groups "developing and developed" countries.
Look how nicely the world's countries fall into the two boxes: developing and developed. And between the two boxes there is a clear gap, containing just 15 small countries (including Cuba, Ireland, and Singapore) where just 2 percent of the world's population lives. In the box labeled "developing," there are 125 bubbles, including China and India. In all those countries, women have more than five children on average, and child deaths are common: fewer than 95 percent of children survive, meaning that more than 5 percent of children die before their fifth birthday. In the other box labeled "developed," there are 44 bubbles, including the United States and most of Europe. In all those countries the women have fewer than 3.5 children per woman and child survival is above 90 percent.
The world fits into two boxes. And these are exactly the two boxes that the student in the third row had imagined. This picture clearly shows a world divided into two groups, with a gap in the middle. How nice. What a simple world to understand! So what's the big deal? Why is it so wrong to label countries as "developed" and "developing"? Why did I give my student who referred to "us and them" such a hard time?
Because this picture shows the world in 1965! When I was a young man. That's the problem. Would you use a map from 1965 to navigate around your country? Would you be happy if your doctor was using cutting-edge research from 1965 to suggest your diagnosis and treatment? The picture below shows what the world looks like today.
The world has completely changed. Today, families are small and child deaths are rare in the vast majority of countries, including the largest: China and India. Look at the bottom left-hand corner. The box is almost empty. The small box, with few children and high survival, that's where all countries are heading. And most countries are already there. Eighty-five percent of mankind are already inside the box that used to be named "developed world." The remaining 15 percent are mostly in between the two boxes. Only 13 countries, representing 6 percent of the world population, are still inside the "developing" box. But while the world has changed, the worldview has not, at least in the heads of the "Westerners." Most of us are stuck with a completely outdated idea about the rest of the world.
The complete world makeover I've just shown is not unique to family size and child survival rates. The change looks very similar for pretty much any aspect of human lives. Graphs showing levels of income, or tourism, or democracy, or access to education, health care, or electricity would all tell the same story: that the world used to be divided into two but isn't any longer. Today, most people are in the middle. There is no gap between the West and the rest, between developed and developing, between rich and poor. And we should all stop using the simple pairs of categories that suggest there is.
My students were dedicated, globally aware young people who wanted to make the world a better place. I was shocked by their blunt ignorance of the most basic facts about the world. I was shocked that they actually thought there were two groups, "us" and "them," shocked to hear them saying that "they" could not live like "us." How was it even possible that they were walking around with a 30-year-old worldview in their heads?
Pedaling home through the rain that evening in October 1995, my fingers numb, I felt fired up. My plan had worked. By bringing the data into the classroom I had been able to prove to my students that the world was not divided into two. I had finally managed to capture their misconception. Now I felt the urge to take the fight further. I realized I needed to make the data even clearer. That would help me to show more people, more convincingly, that their opinions were nothing more than unsubstantiated feelings. That would help me to shatter their illusions that they knew things that really they only felt.
Twenty years later I'm sitting in a fancy TV studio in Copenhagen in Denmark. The "divided" worldview is 20 years older, 20 years more outdated. We're live on air, and the journalist tilts his head and says to me, "We still see an enormous difference between the small, rich world, the old Western world mostly, and then the large part."
"But you're totally wrong," I reply.
Once more I explain that "poor developing countries" no longer exist as a distinct group. That there is no gap. Today, most people, 75 percent, live in middle-income countries. Not poor, not rich, but somewhere in the middle and starting to live a reasonable life. At one end of the scale there are still countries with a majority living in extreme and unacceptable poverty; at the other is the wealthy world (of North America and Europe and a few others like Japan, South Korea, and Singapore). But the vast majority are already in the middle.
"And what do you base that knowledge on?" continued the journalist in an obvious attempt to be provocative. And he succeeded. I couldn't help getting irritated and my agitation showed in my voice, and my words: "I use normal statistics that are compiled by the World Bank and the United Nations. This is not controversial. These facts are not up for discussion. I am right and you are wrong."
Capturing the Beast
Now that I have been fighting the misconception of a divided world for 20 years, I am no longer surprised when I encounter it. My students were not special. The Danish journalist was not special. The vast majority of the people I meet think like this. If you are skeptical about my claim that so many people get it wrong, that's good. You should always require evidence for claims like these. And here it is, in the form of a two-part misconception trap.
First, we had people disclose how they imagined life in so-called low-income countries, by asking questions like this one from the test you did in the introduction.
FACT QUESTION 1
In all low-income countries across the world today, how many girls finish primary school?
[] A: 20 percent
[] B: 40 percent
[] C: 60 percent
On average just 7 percent picked the correct answer, C: 60 percent of girls finish primary school in low-income countries. (Remember, 33 percent of the chimps at the zoo would have gotten this question right.) A majority of people "guessed" that it was just 20 percent. There are only a very few countries in the world — exceptional places like Afghanistan or South Sudan — where fewer than 20 percent of girls finish primary school, and at most 2 percent of the world's girls live in such countries.
When we asked similar questions about life expectancy, undernourishment, water quality, and vaccination rates — essentially asking what proportion of people in low-income countries had access to the basic first steps toward a modern life — we got the same kinds of results. Life expectancy in low-income countries is 62 years. Most people have enough to eat, most people have access to improved water, most children are vaccinated, and most girls finish primary school. Only tiny percentages—way less than the chimps' 33 percent — got these answers right, and large majorities picked the worst alternative we offered, even when those numbers represented levels of misery now being suffered only during terrible catastrophes in the very worst places on Earth.
(Continues...)Excerpted from Factfulness by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund. Copyright © 2018 Factfulness AB. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- Publisher : Flatiron Books; Later prt. edition (April 3, 2018)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 352 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1250107814
- ISBN-13 : 978-1250107817
- Lexile measure : 1000L
- Item Weight : 1.13 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.3 x 1.25 x 8.4 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #77,601 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #78 in Statistics (Books)
- #84 in Probability & Statistics (Books)
- #258 in Cognitive Psychology (Books)
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Tony J. Ridley

About the authors

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Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Co-founder of Gapminder (www.gapminder.org) to promote a fact based worldview everyone can understand. Developed Dollar Street (www.dollarstreet.org), that can be seen in my TED talk from 2017. Co-writer of Factfulness. Have three kids and two cats.
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Customers find the book entertaining, warm, and welcoming. They also describe the content as illuminating, non-political, and powerful. Readers describe the book as highly engaging, simple, and reassuring. However, some find the writing pace tedious and repetitive. Opinions are mixed on the writing style, with some finding it believable and repetitive, while others say it's repetitive and flimsy.
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Customers find the book highly engaging, understandable, and beautifully presented. They also say the content is worth the insulting presentation. Readers describe the book as carefully crafted, clear, and reassuring.
"...Factfulness was a breeze to read, written in a highly engaging style, and chockfull of personal anecdotes, statistical details, and global trends...." Read more
"...A breezy read with a dialectical approach.“Things are bad AND they are also getting better.”..." Read more
"...It is also well written and well organized. I highly recommend this book." Read more
"...find the message worth it and slog through it; the contents are worth the insulting presentation...." Read more
Customers find the book entertaining, witty, and interesting. They also say the author has an engaging, interesting voice.
"...It is written in a very playful way, which was totally expected having seen Hans Rosling's charisma on TED talks and all over YouTube." Read more
"Hans Rosling was probably the most impressive, engaging and impactful TED speaker and health statistician of the last fifty years...." Read more
"...It will challenge you, but also inspire you. The writing is funny at times as well as full of great stories and examples." Read more
"Amazing book, written in a very easy to follow and enjoyable way...." Read more
Customers find the tone of the book warm, welcoming, light-hearted, and humorous. They also appreciate the genuine warmth and caring shown by the author.
"...It is a warm and welcoming book that makes you want to keep finding out how you are wrong.Stories are core to this book...." Read more
"...because of the way it rocked my intellectual world and by the genuine warmth and caring shown by the author." Read more
"Refreshing and 100% on spot about our understanding of the world...." Read more
"This book changed my life in a very gentle way. It's not radical, it's kind. It makes you see the world in a new way...." Read more
Customers find the content concise, evidence-based, and illuminating.
"This book shines a very bright spotlight on both wrong facts and inadequate ways of thinking that taint our view of the world and of humanity's..." Read more
"...It really made me see the world differently and in a more positive light...." Read more
"An illuminating and effortless read (and a great stocking stuffer!): "Factfulness", by Hans Rosling...." Read more
"This book is a ray of light in a dark time. Reading "Factfulness" shows the lives of people around the world have improved...." Read more
Customers find the political content in the book non-political, scientific, and accurate.
"...It is non-partisan, unless looking at reality has become a partisan issue...." Read more
"...A truly non-political, scientific, accurate view of our world today. Here are the facts. You make the decisions...." Read more
"Enlightening! Pretty much politically neutral while providing insights into how to sort through information that is thrown at us daily...." Read more
"...There were a ton of eye-opening things in here. It's not political just, as the title implies, full of great facts about the world...." Read more
Customers find the emotional intensity of the book powerful and essential. They also say it's a light read with a big impact.
"...worked for the book in his dying bed makes it even more dramatic, more powerful." Read more
"...Light read, big impact." Read more
"A powerful and eye-opening read...." Read more
"Simple! Powerful! Essential..." Read more
Customers are mixed about the writing style. Some find the message believable, realistic, riveting, and passionate. They also say the book provides an incredibly realistic outlook on global economic and social factors. However, some customers feel the content is repetitive, plain, and has flaws in the logic and conclusions derived from the facts. They say the quality is not so good and the book is deliberately misleading.
"...The physical book itself is not the highest quality and some of the printing related to the many graphs is in very small font and very faintly..." Read more
"...I found his central argument compelling and convincing and appreciated Rosling's ability to communicate that he isn't some pie in the sky optimist..." Read more
"...are not as bad as we think they are, is at least misleading and quite possibly false, unless—again—one is working with a dubious interpretation of “..." Read more
"...so interesting I couldn't put the book down... after that its really repetitive and I feel like an old man is trying to hammer his advise into me...." Read more
Customers find the writing pace tedious, taking forever to get to a point, and hard to finish every chapter.
"...It is a good way to grab attention, but difficult in execution. In this case, the Roslings created a speed bump too large for me...." Read more
"...My only quibble is that the book is too long, so it's hard for me to finish every chapter." Read more
"Far too simple/uninformative for any person with a decent understanding of statistics. Concepts are clearly explained" Read more
"This guy takes forever to get to a point. Dry and boring read...." Read more
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I heartily recommend Factfulness by Hans Rosling and his co-authors Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Ronnlund. My bookclub picked it because the subtitle (ten reasons we’re wrong about the world - and why things are better than you think) sounded hopeful and we’re all hungry for hope. And I have to say, aside from all the ways Rosling shows how we misinterpret the world and how to combat our all too human instincts, reading it actually did have a wonderfully calming effect!
Rosling outlines 10 basic instincts that plague our perceptions of the world: The Gap Instinct, the Negativity Instinct, the Straight Line instinct, the Fear instinct, the Size instinct, the Generalization instinct, the Destiny instinct, the Single Perspective instinct, the Blame instinct, and the Urgency instinct. I found myself guilty of almost all of them in very obvious ways, and probably the ones I didn’t recognize, I’m also playing out in some subconscious (to myself) way.
“Stay open to new data, and be prepared to keep freshening up your knowledge.”
I deeply appreciated being taught that there is no binary between "developed" and "developing" countries - rather a continuum from Level 1 to Level 4, each with its own set of challenges. It took the World Bank 17 years and 14 of Rosling's talks to stop espousing this false binary, so maybe it's not so shameful that it took me 45 years to stop doing it myself.
Each chapter has a textbook-like ending with tips and tricks to deal with each of these biases. “Tips and tricks” is far too pat a way to describe the often simple, elegant, and profound advice he proffers. For example, his phrase “bad and better” is about being able to hold two conflicting ideas in your head: that the world is bad and that it’s getting better. So one could both acknowledge very dire problems as well as the progress and solutions that have happened and are to come. This is not to minimize the issues, but to understand how the world actually works in order to really change it. The benefits to this approach are: 1) be able to see the world or a particular problem more accurately and complexly, 2) devise and/or maintain effective multi-player multi-pronged solutions, and 3) act from a position of knowledge and power and hope rather than one of despair and stress.
That last bit alone was validation enough for me. We live in a time that feels overwhelming and hopeless at times, and it was an enormous relief to be able to acknowledge our very real accomplishments and progress, as well as the proposition that some of what we’re doing is working - perhaps too slowly for our liking, but it’s working.
For example, we’ve achieved enormous success in increasing child survival and almost all of it has been achieved through “preventive measures outside hospitals by local nurses, midwives, and well-educated parents. Especially mothers: the data shows that half the increase in child survival in the world happens because the mothers can read and write.”
That last underpins Rosling’s oft-repeated mantra of education and contraceptives as part of the solution to eradicate poverty, curb population growth, and give people better lives. He calls eradicating extreme poverty a moral imperative and I can’t think of much better goals.
“We should be teaching our children humility and curiosity.”
Another example of progress referred to our disaster prevention measures and other modern indicators and technologies. Because of these, the number of deaths from acts of nature is now just 25% of what it was 100 years ago. Keep in mind that during that same time, our population increased by 5 billion people, so the drop in deaths per capita is even more astonishing: just 6% of what it was 100 years ago.
Bangladesh comes up several times in the book, and not as a basket case as is often the case in the news, but as an example of inspirational progress. For example, after far too many devastating floods and cyclones and ensuing famines, the Bangladeshi government installed a country-wide digital surveillance system connected to a freely available flood-monitoring website. Just 15 years ago, no country in the world had such an advanced system. It has also improved its economic position drastically, going from a level 1 country (one marked by extreme poverty) to level 2 in just 4 decades.
“Insist on a full range of scenarios.”
I found myself giving the most pushback in the chapter that tackled environmental concerns, which Rosling readily acknowledges at the outset of the chapter as one of the most pressing issues humans face. Ok, so the total wild populations of tigers, giant pandas, and black rhinos have all increased over the past years. Is that a reason to rest on our laurels? Not that Rosling counsels any resting - on the contrary, his life is testament to an almost maniacal commitment to help the world’s young and poor and helpless. But I kept thinking: everything is horrible and our wildlife and seas are dying - we have to do something drastic now! Ironically, this was also the chapter about the urgency instinct, and how the now-or-never/either-or way of thinking is probably the wrong approach. Touché, Dr. Rosling.
I took almost 9 pages of notes while reading Factfulness, and it almost felt like taking a (great) course. I wish I had had the chance to see Rosling talk in person but there are apparently dozens of TEDtalks and other lectures he’s given, online (sadly, he passed away just before the book came out). And I’m glad the waiting list at the library was so long that I ended up buying the book, because it’s one I will reread and quote and learn from for a long time to come.
Factfulness was a breeze to read, written in a highly engaging style, and chockfull of personal anecdotes, statistical details, and global trends. I hope everyone reads it and feels charged and ready to continue changing the world for the better.
“Welcome complexity. Combine ideas. Compromise.”
Rosling discusses ten instincts; the gap instinct, the negativity instinct, the straight line instinct, the fear instinct, the size instinct, the generalization instinct, the destiny instinct, the single perspective instinct, the blame instinct, and the urgency instinct. Once we have been made aware of these instincts and how they mislead us we are much better equipped to understand the world. The gap instinct makes us divide the world into developed and developing countries whilst in reality nations are on a sliding scale from poor to rich and in general moving towards rich. Also difference within countries are typically more important. The negativity instinct, our tendency to notice the bad more than the good, causes us to ignore the silent miracle of human progress, etc.
Rosling said something that resonated with me “the world cannot be understood without numbers. And it cannot be understood with numbers alone”. The book contains a lot of interesting statistics that may seem counterintuitive to many people. Surveys show most people believe things have gotten worse for us humans. However, people are better off. In the chapter on the negativity instinct there are 36 graphs showing how things have gotten better (32 graphs on just four pages). Violence is decreasing, poverty is decreasing, infectious disease is decreasing, people are living longer. Here are a few things that a few of the graphs show:
* The average length of life in the world has gone from 31 years in 1800 to 72 years in 2017
* Children dying before their fifth birthday has gone from 44% in 1800 to 4% in 2016
* The rate of undernourished people in the world has gone from 28% in 1970 to 11% in 2015, despite the world population doubling
* Cereal yield per acre in the world has gone from 1.4 ton per acre in 1961 to 4 ton in 2014
* Literacy has gone from 10% in 1800 to 86% in 2016
Despite all the good news in this book he says we should still worry. The five things that concerns the author the most are the risk of global pandemic, financial collapse, world war, climate change and extreme poverty. He dedicates the next five sections to discussing those five concerns. However, another issue that he does not discuss is that as the human condition has gotten better that of animals has largely gotten worse. Not only are there fewer wild animals and less habitat for wild animals but with factory farming and other modern practices the quality of life for domesticated animals has gotten much worse. I know that may be outside of the scope of this book, but it was something that occurred to me.
One statement in the book that may seem confusing but certainly is interesting is this: “There has been progress in human rights, animal protection, women’s education, climate awareness, catastrophe relief, and many other areas where activists raise awareness by saying that things are getting worse. That progress is often largely thanks to these activists. Maybe they could achieve more though, if they didn’t have such a singular perspective.”
Overall, I loved this book because it is filled with clever analysis and interesting statistics. It is a book that will help you understand the world better. Unless you already know the facts and statistics presented in this book, this book will revolutionize how you view the world. It is also well written and well organized. I highly recommend this book.
Top reviews from other countries
Molto bello perché mi è piaciuto molto il libro di Hans bravo scrittore svedese intelligente
The facts are very important. Don't make judgements without facts! The world is better than most people think!





























