Name: Factfulness
Rating: 4.402640264026402 (303 reviews)
ISBN: 9781473637481

Hans Rosling

Anna Rosling Rönnlund

Ola Rosling

'One of the most important books I've ever read - an indispensable guide to thinking clearly about the world' BILL GATES 'A hopeful book about the potential for human progress when we work off facts rather than our inherent biases' BARACK OBAMA The international bestseller, 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 make you realise things are better than you thought. *#1 Sunday Times bestseller * New York Times bestseller * Observer 'best brainy book of the decade' * Irish Times bestseller * audiobook bestseller * Guardian bestseller *

Ten Reasons We're Wrong About The World - And Why Things Are Better Than You Think

Factfulness

Lizzy Jensen

Veerendranath

There's no room for facts when our minds are occupied by fear.

If we are not extremely careful, we come to believe that the unusual is usual: that this is what the world looks like.

When we are afraid and under time pressure and thinking of worst-case scenarios, we tend to make really stupid decisions. Our ability to think analytically can be overwhelmed by an urge to make quick decisions and take immediate action.

Cassandra Tang

This is data as you have never known it: it is data as therapy. It is understanding as a source of mental peace. Because the world is not as dramatic as it seems.

When we are afraid, we do not see clearly.

The world cannot be understood without numbers. But the world cannot be understood with numbers alone.

Data must be used to tell the truth, and to call to action, no matter how noble the intentions.

*the #1 Sunday Times bestseller * instant New York Times bestseller * #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller * * Irish Times bestseller * Audio bestseller * Guardian bestseller * 'One of the most important books I've ever read - an indispensable guide to thinking clearly about the world.' BILL GATES *BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week* '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: The stress-reducing habit of only carrying opinions for which you have strong supporting facts. When asked simple questions about global trends - why the world's population is increasing; how many young women go to school; how many of us live in poverty - we systematically get the answers wrong. So wrong that a chimpanzee choosing answers at random will consistently outguess journalists, Nobel laureates, and investment bankers. In Factfulness, Professor of International Health and a man who can make data sing, Hans Rosling, together with his two long-time collaborators Anna and Ola, offers a radical new explanation of why this happens, and reveals the ten instincts that distort our perspective. It turns out that the world, for all its imperfections, is in a much better state than we might think. 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.

The Ten Reason We're Wrong About the World--And Why Things Are Better Than You Think

LeeSa Geelhood

Super interesting! Gives perspective to my Level 4 life.

Dani

Incredibly insightful read on building a fact-based world view

Reiza H

I remember, during my early years as a university student, me and my friend once had a debate with a member of a well-known religious organization. We discussed about how to solve the Palestine problem, and what's shocking to me is that how simple thing was in his mind. To him, the solution was simple. "Why don't use military force to help liberate those Palestinian? Simple."

I think it's kind of a joke but seeing his serious tone and voice, I guess he's dead serious.

This book reminded me of that situation. One of the chapter of the book discuss about the instinct to see things as simple as possible. Seeing it only with a single perspective only. It's so tempting, it's so simple. To quote the book, "All problems have a single cause -- something we must always be completely against. Or all problems have a single solution -- something we must always be for. Everything is simple. There's just one small issue. We completely misunderstand the world."

In fact, this single perspective instinct is just one of the reasons we're so wrong about the world we live in. There are The Gap Instinct, The Negativity, The Straight Line, The Fear, The Size, The Generalization, The Destiny, The Blame, and the Urgency Instinct. Each of the instinct is our tendency when we are confronted with some news, articles, data, questionnaires, etc. Something that seems, in our mind, has made the world unsafe than ever before. Seeing how hoaxes and news circulated everywhere on social media, it seems more true than ever. The world is on fire, and the good old days has indeed left us.

But in reality, that's not the case. The world is safer, and in better condition. While it's true that global warming and terrorism is on the rise (not to mention the current pandemic condition, which left us exhausted and anxious) but overall, things are better than if we compared with, say, 20 or 30 years ago. I mean, just think about it. The risk of a global thermonuclear war is much higher 30 years ago than it's now. Not to mention the chaotic condition we Indonesians felt on the early years of the second millennium. It's much more stable now. Sure, we still got lots of problems to tackle with, but indeed, we, both as a nation and a global community, have some progress that worth recognize for.

In conclusion, this book doesn't want us to be a pessimist, but it doesn't want us to be a highly optimistic person too. The goals of the book is, to taught us about having a rational, clear view of the world based on data, and to use it so that we can be much more constructive to help shape our world.

And the book serves it well.

In memory of Hans Rosling.

-- Thank you Sany for the book --

Elisavet Rozaki 

Lindy

I didn't personally particularly like this book or find it to be useful. However, I can easily imagine the type of person who would. 

If you're someone who feels overwhelmed to the point of paralysis by the news cycle, your anxiety levels spike every time there's a mass shooting, or if you're someone who has difficulty putting reported numbers into context (and maybe struggled a lot with word problems in school), I think Factfulness might be helpful to you. There's a lot of basic, yet practical, advice about how to think about statistics (don't look at numbers in isolation, proportions will always be more useful, most things fall into distributions rather than discrete categories, and so on) as well as reminders about how people tend to be drawn to big flashy stories of disaster and that complex problems have no singular cause and no magic bullet solutions.

As for my issues:
I generally consider myself an ignoramus when it comes to topics surrounding global poverty. Before I started reading Factfulness, I'd say my grasp of the key issues is average at best. Turns out I'm much more accurately informed than average. It's a strange experience reading book with the premise that everything I know is wrong and the truth will blow my mind when I'm mostly right; I felt a little condescended to. I feel like it's relevant to mention that my academic background is in anthropology, which means I've had "every assumption about people you've ever had is probably wrong" thoroughly drilled into my head. 

It also means that the need to deconstruct progress narratives has been drilled into my head, and well, Factfulness is nothing if not one giant progress narrative, where, if all goes according to the destiny of human progress, communities pass through income levels (at one point compared to a video game), their citizens finally achieving the 'modern' lifestyles currently enjoyed by people like myself. The author is very fond of writing things like 'people in x country live like people in y country 100 years ago'. The problem with all of this is that much of the 'progress' of United Kingdom, of the United States, and so on was made possible through slavery, colonialism, and the outsourcing of labor especially with regard to infrastructure, and if certain high levels of consumption are happening, someone's in a sweatshop somewhere. This is wholly swept under the rug. I also rolled my eyes at the constant exhortations directed towards American/Swedish businesspeople to start marketing their products to the emergent African consumer markets; not because those consumer markets don't exist, but because it's just so... colonialist. 

And then one starts probing the numbers and they're not wrong exactly, just intentionally gotcha-y and occasionally a little weaselly.

ahmed

We should teach this book in school,university and everywhere
In addition to the facts correction about the world, two important points you will learn in this book 
First: how to think about the facts thrown in our face every single day in our life from everyone, in daily conversations, media, internet, friends ,.. 
Imagine if you tried to think about all facts using the same methods mentioned in the book , how many more you will need to revise
The second point is "progress" : how to measure progress correctly , maybe the current progress in comparison to the end goal is not enough (usually it's never enough ) but still it's important and needed to compared to the initial state over time , it gives hope, there is a chance , maybe there is a hope after all

Hooman Rostami

As you can find out from earlier reviews, the book is such a delight to read. The authors talks about what it is relevant on the big picture and give you hope based on data and numbers. The authors started with a test witch bunch a questions, similar to the ones in Hans' TED talk, and shows how based on the answers given by different people, majority gets totally wrong, in fact opposite. The majority think the world is getting worse, while the opposite is true. They present this 10 tools, if you may call it, to give us a toolbox to get better in understanding the world. What I like about how they are presenting these instincts/biases not as if it is something they haven't done it themselves. Hans give couple of examples where he judged someone or a situation and how he can fall into the traps of what he is actively trying to educate us. I appreciate this and it puts the writer in the same boat as us the readers. I like to thank the authors for creating this great work.

I recommend this to everyone who’s interested in a deeper understanding of the world through numbers and charts 

JimStritzkt

Ricardo

Must read. Not because of the facts presented themselves (although just knowing some of them appear worse than they really are, brings some comfort), but because of the mindset shift it proposes from our conditioned minds of many years getting the facts from the media only.
It seems even more important in the current phase we live in (covid pandemic) that we should live a more fact-based life, and together, in this state of mind, we could clear the air of all the toxicity we see and feel every day.

Great book, helps to look at the world from a different perspective. Really provokes us to go beyond our biases and apply contexts to different facts and figures.

Rahul Rajeev

Yash

I would say this book is a classic and I might just use it as a means to teach the kids a thing or two. Using conversational language, the book sucked me in, it was like having a conversation with the late Dr Rosling himself, you can feel as though he is there guiding you like a patient Professor during a class discussion. Having been in the medical background myself, it all felt familiar and relatable. Upon completion of the book, I felt like that medical student who left the class discussion with an increased level of confidence to look at the world. It is truly a gem and this will be one of my re-reads from time to time again. Highly recommend.

Mark Palfreeman 

Eye-opening book with a simple premise: let the data speak (and wait for data before forming too many opinions). The book could probably be a TED talk, but it's the hands-on examples and research that bring the points home. The world is likely very different than we imagine, and we should bring a level of humility to get our facts straight before weighing in too heavily on matters or dividing people into incorrect stereotypes. I appreciate the reality that things are better than they seem, while there's still a lot we can (and should) change to improve people's lives.

Sarah Schumacher

On my Books Every Human Should Read list. Fascinating, written with expertise, experience and humility. I don’t understand all the reviews using the word “condescending” - I didn’t see that (with the exception of one rather shocking anecdote from when he was a new graduate). He frequently shares polling data that shows ignorance on the part of highly educated people, but that’s the data he’s using to reveal the problem. He also freely shared his own mistakes.

Reading at the end of 2022, I was struck by the fact that his number one practical concern (in 2017) was a global pandemic (not that he was the only one - this has long been known to be inevitable). As much as the world could have benefitted from his wisdom in 2020, maybe it’s better he didn’t see how badly it was handled…

What I enjoyed most was how infinitely practical this was. Lots of charts, the fallacies are presented clearly, and each chapter ends with a bullet point list to solidify the concepts he’s described with personal stories. This book is neither boring or clinical, and it’s an excellent antidote for the insidious, Western/Euro-centrist thinking that’s both prevalent and rarely remarked upon.

If you liked this book and have kids, I’d also recommend Raising Critical Thinkers by Julie Bogart. For more positivity on the world, Humankind by Rutger Bregman, although that one’s still in my tsundoku pile.

Jonathan Tysick

Thought provoking, easy to read and conversation sparking. Will definitely change the way you think about the world!

Gavin

1. In all low-income countries across the world today, how many girls finish primary school?
2. Where does the majority of the world population live?
3. In the last 20 years, the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has…
4. What is the life expectancy of the world today?
5. There are 2 billion children in the world today, aged 0 to 15 years old. How many children will there be in the year 2100, according to the United Nations?
6. The UN predicts that by 2100 the world population will have increased by another 4 billion people. What is the main reason?
7. How did the number of deaths per year from natural disasters change over the last hundred years?
...



Only 10% of people scored better than random guessing on these questions, the most important trends of the last hundred years. How can it be that we are both 1) a rabidly overconfident species and 2) an extremely pessimistic species that generally gets these simple, objective questions very wrong (doing far worse than random)? Sure, we could just be dogmatic nihilists or idiots, but that doesn't fit that well. 

  A stunning 15% of humans managed to pick the wrong answer on all twelve questions. That’s almost impossible for a monkey to achieve. It requires systematic misconceptions. The problem here is not the lack of correct knowledge. The problem is the presence of wrong “knowledge”. To score this bad requires a false perception of the world, that make you pick the wrong answer systematically.


Rosling explains it in terms of cognitive biases: we suffer from a 
  dramatic
 worldview, binarised, conflict-obsessed, and blamey. 

People seem to find Development - the completely unprecedented explosion of survival, freedom, and dignity for the larger part of the entire world! - boring. (You could blame the media, but Rosling persuasively argues that they too are an epiphenomenon of our evolved fear and narrowness.)

  Your most important challenge in developing a fact-based worldview is to realize that most of your firsthand experiences are from Level 4 [the top 10% of global income]; and that your secondhand experiences are filtered through the mass media, which loves nonrepresentative extraordinary events and shuns normality. 

When you live on Level 4, everyone on Levels 3, 2, and 1 can look equally poor, and the word poor can lose any specific meaning... Anyone who has looked down from the top of a tall building knows that it is difficult to assess from there the differences in height of the buildings nearer the ground. They all look kind of small... It is natural to miss the distinctions between the people with cars, the people with motorbikes and bicycles, the people with sandals, and the people with no shoes at all. 



On the shocking lack of empiricism even in the most important places like medicine and policy:

  In the 1960s, the success of the recovery position inspired new public health advice, against most traditional practices, to put babies to sleep on their tummies... Even though the data showed that sudden infant deaths went up, not down, it wasn’t until 1985 that a group of pediatricians in Hong Kong actually suggested that the prone position might be the cause. Even then, doctors in Europe didn’t pay much attention. It took Swedish authorities another seven years to accept their mistake and reverse the policy...

With my own hands, over a decade or so, I turned many babies from back to tummy to prevent 
suffocation and save lives. So did many other doctors and parents throughout Europe and the United 
States, until the advice was finally reversed, 18 months after the Hong Kong study was published. 
Thousands of babies died because of a sweeping generalization, including some during the months 
when the evidence was already available. 



  Two hundred ninety-two brave young feminists had traveled to Stockholm from across the world to coordinate their struggle to improve women's access to education. But only 8 percent knew that 30-year-old women have spent on average only one year less in school than 30-year-old men.



Bad incentives and noble lies are another reason for the stubborn gloom of intellectuals:

  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.


Relentlessly sensible:

  resist blaming any one individual or group of individuals for anything. Because the problem is that when we identify the bad guy, we are done thinking. And it’s almost always more complicated than that. It’s almost always about multiple interacting causes—a system. If you really want to change the world, you have to understand how it actually works and forget about punching anyone in the face. 



I've been studying Development for years and this still taught me plenty. It should shock you into awareness and hopefully more.

  Paying too much attention to the individual visible victim rather than to the numbers can lead us to spend all our resources on a fraction of the problem, and therefore save many fewer lives. This principle applies anywhere we are prioritizing scarce resources. It is hard for people to talk about resources when it comes to saving lives, or prolonging or improving them Doing so is often taken for heartlessness. Yet so long as resources are not infinite—and they never are infinite—it is the most compassionate thing to do to use your brain and work out how to do the most good with what you have. 



One of the "five books that represent my worldview": moral passion, strict empiricism, psychological depth, existential hope. I picked this rather than Enlightenment Now or Rational Optimist or Doing Good Better or Our World In Data or Whole Earth Discipline (out of the contemporary literature of progress) because it also covers heuristics and biases - and so substitutes / complements Kahneman, Taleb, Hanson, and Yudkowsky, without (what people insist on seeing as) their self-superior wonkishness.


  Thank you industrialization, thank you steel mill, thank you power station, thank you chemical-processing industry, for giving us the time to read books. 


In a sense he stays on the surface - this isn't the full radical evolutionary account of 
  Elephant in the Brain
, instead just noting some bad epistemic practices and gesturing at evolutionary theory. But that said, there's a "charity is not about helping" bit:

  If I check the World Wildlife Fund I can see how, despite declines in some local populations, the total wild populations of tigers, giant pandas, and black rhinos have all increased over the past years. It was worth paying for all those pandas stickers on the doors all around Stockholm. Yet only 6% of the Swedish public knows that their support has had any effect.



But despite all the suffering and error and backfiring efforts he describes, he is trying to make you realise how good things could be:

  Could everyone have a fact-based worldview one day? Big change is always difficult to imagine. But it is definitely possible, and I think it will happen, for two simple reasons. First: a fact-based worldview is more useful for navigating life, just like an accurate GPS is more useful for finding your way in the city. Second, and probably more important: a fact-based worldview is more comfortable. It creates less stress and hopelessness than the dramatic worldview, simply because the dramatic one is so negative and terrifying. 

When we have a fact-based worldview, we can see that the world is not as bad as it seems— and we can see what we have to do to keep making it better. 


This, then, is the same message as Sagan, 25 years ago: the emotional gain of reason. 

---

Misc notes

- Binary categories are often unhelpful because they obscure continuum. Rosling ranted against "developed" / "developing" for 20 years. The World Bank has caught on but the UN haven't.

- He is a better messenger for the cognitive bias alarm, for activists anyway, because of his deep credibility: he mucked in to anti-poverty measures for decades. Some of his anecdotes are chilling.

  I could tell you countless stories of the nonsense I saw in Cuba: the local moonshine, a toxic fluorescent concoction brewed inside TV tubes using water, sugar, and babies’ poopy diapers to provide the yeast required for fermentation; the hotels that hadn’t planned for any guests and so had no food, a problem we solved by driving to an old people’s home and eating their leftovers from the standard adult food rations; my Cuban colleague who knew his children would be expelled from 
university if he sent a Christmas card to his cousin in Miami; the fact that I had to explain my research methods to Fidel Castro personally to get approval. I will restrain myself and just tell you why I was there and what I discovered. 


- "I do not believe that fake news is the major culprit for our distorted worldview: we haven’t only just started to get the world wrong, I think we have always gotten it wrong."

- "In the car industry, cars are recalled when a mistake is discovered. You get a letter from the manufacturer saying, “We would like to recall your vehicle and replace the brakes.” When the facts about the world that you were taught in schools and universities become out of date, you should get a letter too: “Sorry, what we taught you is no longer true. Please return your brain for a free upgrade.” "

Bouke van der Bijl

This book encourages you to look at ‘the rest of the world’ in a fact-based manner, and to depart from such knee jerk falsities as ‘Africa is bad, has always been and will always be’ when in fact a lot of progress is being made. It is also no longer true that there is such a thing as ‘the west’ and ‘the rest’, instead the countries of the world are now on a scale. We need to acknowledge that things can be bad and getting better at the same time. 

The book is structured around ten factfulness rules of thumb:

1. Gap: look at where the majority is. 
2. Negativity: expect bad news. 
3. Straight line: trend lines might bend. 
4. Fear: make decisions on actual risk instead of fear-based gut. 
5. Size: place facts (especially large numbers) in proportion. 
6. Generalization: question the categories in which you place things. Does it even make sense to place all of ‘Asia’ in one bucket? (No)
7. Destiny: just because you don’t notice incremental 3% change doesn’t mean things will always be the same
8. Single: get multiple perspectives on things to get a more accurate understanding 
9. Blame: resist pointing a finger at a single thing as the cause of something
10. Urgency: resist making urgency-based decisions. Things are often not as urgent as they may seem

“One of the most important books I’ve ever read—an indispensable guide to thinking clearly about the world.” – Bill Gates “Hans Rosling tells thestory 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 readershow to see it clearly.” —Melinda Gates 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.

Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

Lord Aragorn

An excellent book! I couldn't put it down and it was a very easy read. If you have watched Hans Rosling's TED talks, you already know the gist but the book was pretty entertaining. All of the anecdotes that brought life to the facts were fun to read. If you imagine the text in Hans' accent, with all his enthusiasm in sharing ideas, you will love the book. 

The only thing that makes me sad is that it's going to be hard for me to find another fun book like this to read!

Charlotte Dann

Solid read about global trends through the lens of a framework for critical data analysis and assumption-busting. Peppered with many enlightening and humorous (occasionally grave) stories from his work as a public health researcher - you know when a book about statistics starts with a story about sword swallowing you're off to a good start. See if you can beat my 9/12 in the quiz ;)

Nast

A must read piece. It inspires the reader to take a fact-based approach to our world view. And it helps to deactivate our flawed cognitive biases when we try to understand abstract realities concerning Humanity’s present.

Madhuri jain

Very interesting read

In our day today life, journalists, politicians and field experts impact our views about the world. Hans provides other side of the coin by looking at the fact based data instead of trusting people blindly. World is improving...slow change is a change ultimately..!! Hoping for a better world...

Rohini Anandamurugan

Data as therapy, for sure. As expected, the authors drew from a wealth of data to make a level-headed case without any exaggeration. The book was also very concise and to the point. 

I was completely sold by the authors' empathy. The duality of being able to hold space for people who struggle today vs being able to put things in context over a long term was quite impressive.

I highly recommend this book.

Nick Gracilla

Imagine making decisions and judgements based on what we knew from the 1940s: we’d say, hopelessly out of date, behind the times, not modern. Yet, when it comes to fundamental world facts—poverty, education, population—Hans proves, via surveys included in the book, that most “Westerners” are doing just that. He identifies 10 biases that were once useful for our survival, but are now distorting our world view such that we cannot are the reality of improvements around us — or focus on real threats to our future. A must read.

Factfulness Ten Reasons We're Wrong About The World - And Why Things Are Better Than You Think

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