Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think Hardcover – April 3, 2018

I bought this book after seeing Bill Gates recommendation, and I have been really enjoying it. It goes a long way towards explaining human cognitive behavior in the face of today's "us vs. them" social media environment, as well as more historical cases where people just have a really hard time accepting the fact that things are almost always better than they think they are, and the extremes are much rarer than most people would guess.

It ought to be required reading at the high school level IMHO.

It's very well written and readable (the author is famous for his Ted talks on the subject). He really wants to help everyone understand and learn how to better evaluate what they hear about the world.

A couple notes: you can download a whole chapter of the book from Bill Gates web site if you want to read more of it in advance. The Kindle version is currently broken on some devices (at least my Chromebook running the Android Kindle app) where it won't render any page contents properly unless you tap to zoom out to the page browsing mode where it does look correct.

Hans Rosling explains how media bias, ideological preconceptions and statistical illiteracy makes most people (in rich countries) believe in a gloomy and spectacularly wrong worldview. The book carefully explains by data and vivid examples how positive developments are systematically underreported, while disaster news are vastly over-reported. Rosling categorise the 10 most important sources of bias and misconceptions as well as explaining strategies on how to avoid them.

This book is a treasure trove of evidence based reasoning, global statistics and myth busting! I read it just after finishing Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. These books have a lot in common, both in goal and tone, but I enjoyed Rosling's book much more.

Unless you have watched Roslings famous lectures (available on TED and Youtube), this book will forever change the way you understand global health, demography and development.

This is quite a remarkable book. Dr. Rosling and his team have produced a book which could form the basis for how a rational person learns to understand the world. Think of this book as a primer on how to think about what you hear, read, or view regarding the world in general and how to critique content. Young people could really benefit from this book as it sets out methods on how to think and evaluate "information" rationally and positively. Older readers could benefit by challenging how they currently think and evaluate information. I can see where some people might dislike this book because it may violate their partisan or emotional way of thinking, but this may be a good thing, and while the book is written in a very easy to read style, it does take some effort. I read it in two days and plan to re-read soon.

I really like the way he breaks-down data into quartiles and tries to explain issues based on income and education. I wish he used quintiles. I like the way he mostly avoids partisanship and advocates a blend of fact-based analysis, necessary regulation, and free markets. His criticisms of "activists" and their methods are quite revealing but he needed to spend some time on the "other side" which hysterically oppose the "activists." "Fairness" and "good data" should trump advocacy. HIs critique of the media is quite refreshing.

It is possible that Dr. Rosling places too much emphasis on income, and dismisses too easily other sociological factors in explaining human behavior and what I call societal progress, including income. Correlation studies are not causality studies. The 9/11 terrorists were often either very rich or came from rich families and were educated. Many of their followers are drawn from poverty, but some are not. Other factors appear to be as important as education and economic level. Native culture, religion, and tribalism really do affect economic and social progress, and in this Dr. Rosling may very well be off the mark.

The late Dr. Rosling was guilty of some of the accusations he directed at others, both named and unnamed. His grasp of economics was stereotypically shallow and somewhat naïve, and he spends almost no time digging into it beyond the usual pot-shots at "big-business" and "big-pharma." He spent no time on "bad governance" per se, which may be the biggest factor of all. This is unfortunate, as economics and bad governance are at least as important as the topics he covers so well. At times I was left with the impression that he wanted to have things "both ways." I think that his time spent providing free care to the desperately poor in Africa may have affected his judgement a bit, but that is understandable and forgivable. HIs attempt to not "offend" the reader may have resulted in some ambiguity.

A follow-up book with more depth would be great, only Dr. Rosling is dead.

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 printed, making it difficult to read if you are over 30. Hopefully this can be corrected in future editions. Also, while the book contains pages of "Sources" in the back, there is no traditional footnoting and linked cross-referencing to those "Sources," making it impossible to really check his assertions against his sources.

I strongly recommend this book to everyone. A good gift for those who tend to believe "alternate facts." Maybe they can learn to focus on "real" facts and understand what they really mean. Or not. We each make our own decisions.

Best regards.

I read Steve Pinker’s Enlightenment Now prior to reading Factfulness, primarily because I got Pinker's book first. But I’m glad that it happened that way. Though I enjoyed Enlightenment Now, I think Factfulness drives home the same message that our world is truly making positive progress, but with such gripping real world observations that it almost reads more like Dr. Hans Rosling’s memoir.

Dr. Rosling’s stories of working as a medical doctor in some of the countries that many Westerners would lump under the stereotype of an impoverished “Third World” are as real as it gets. His stories from the field illustrate the devastating results that our ignorance and biases can create. But others so clearly show the progress we, as a species, have made as a result of our better understanding of the facts.

I would definitely recommend reading both Enlightenment Now, for a more academic and research-based perspective, and Factfulness, for its memorable stories that drive home the need for fact-based thinking.

A simple summary of this excellent book would be: It's not what you don't know that harms you, it's what you KNOW that's NOT SO!!!

Amazing book that puts the world into a realistic perspective. It is not unnecessarily positive but will leave you with a better feeling about society and the world as a whole!