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

The book left me encouraged about the progress outside the western world. I did not do well on the quiz. yet, I have seen the homeless in San Diego. Detroit slums are horrible. The water in Flint is deadly. The crime rate in St. Louis and Chicago is scary. Many small cities in the rural south have more adults on welfare than have jobs. The US is more divided than ever, it seems. There is more to life than global public health. While this book touched on many improvements around the globe, the author failed to mention the heartaches even in the western world. The book left me a little cold, not warm and fuzzy.

This is a fantastic book for creating a new, more useful baseline rather that just "developed' vs "developing" which does not account for the huge levels of variation among countries and cities around the world. While essential for anyone working in international non-profits, I would also highly recommend this book to business people who are missing out on entire markets they could be selling their product to because they don't understand that they have customers there.

I also love the visualizations from the bubble charts on the inside cover and the associated Gapminder website allows people to see each country's development over the last 200 years. It's also great to see visually how we are describing people's lives on each of the four levels Rosling identifies.

Too bad the author isn't still alive to talk about the topic further.

In the top five books that I have read...and I read a lot of books! This is tremendously readable non-fiction. Well-researched, well-written, and organized for ease of learning, with honesty, humor, and personal perspective. I have learned more from this one book than I have learned from any other I have read.

Yikes!
The book is so badly written and sloppily edited; the logic is so untenable and self referential; and the author is so enamored of his own invented reality, that I’m astounded President Obama put it on his list of must reads! A complete waste of paper, ink, and my money and time.

I am a physician, so was excited to read this book by an author in my field.

The book is well organized and well written, and effectively uses clear examples to demonstrate common flaws in thinking.

However, the concepts the author lays out are a very basic. This book might be most useful for a middle/high school audience, as adolescent and young adults hone their critical thinking skills.

While the author claims that it is adults who often have deficient critical thinking skills, the 13 questions presented at the start of the book to support this assertion and the reasoning behind it is flawed. The results of those questions generally indicate "systematic error" in the absence of facts, but do not provide any insight into the types of error that occur in the presence of facts, which is what most of the remainder of the book discusses.

Lastly, while it is certainly a worthwhile point that things are better than we think, I believe the book is incomplete; any discussion about whether the world is better/worse than we think must address not just the issue whether there has been progress (as a binary question), but also how the world is doing in its *rate* of progress , which the book fails to address.

A perfect example of a writer who is more caught up in himself, than his topic.

Narcissism spoils the day, and the book.
You’re better off to watch the Ted Talk. Don’t waste your dignity on the puffery shared here

Hans Rosling sadly died of pancreatic cancer at age 68 in February of 2017 as this book was being completed. His co-authors (son Ola and Ola's wife Anna) finished the book. This book is written in his voice, and is as much a memoir of his experiences and thoughts as anything else. The book Factfulness is not really about facts per se, in a scientific sort of way. Instead, it is about a way of looking at the world.

Hans Rosling lived a larger-than-life life. He traveled the world as a doctor and then a speaker. He visited some of the poorest areas of the world and helped people there deal with disease and death. In particular, he named and investigated the paralytic disease konzo, which comes from impoverished people in rural Africa eating unprocessed, bitter cassava.

But as noted by a journalist, it wasn’t wise to tell Hans Rosling that konzo is caused by bitter cassava. He would insist that the disease has other factors as well: poverty, severe malnourishment, conflict and a lack of infrastructure. And knowing that was important. "If you do not find the true cause, you do not act correctly," he said.

Hans Rosling was always adamant like that. Stubbornly so. A bit of a scold. He told one journalist: "These facts are not up for discussion. I am right and you are wrong."

Trouble is, things are not that simple. Rarely, if ever, is it simply a choice between right and wrong. Between truth and falsity. Between good and evil. Problems are hard to solve. Seizing on simplistic answers may feel good, and may work politically, but in the real world that doesn't work.

For example, Hans Rosling talks about the fact that Americans spend the most on health care but have the 40th-longest average life expectancy. He says, "the answer is not difficult." Just offer everyone basic public health insurance like every other rich country does. Now, he says, rich, insured patients in the United States visit doctors more than they need to, so they waste the physician's time that could be used to save lives or treat illnesses. If everyone had insurance, doctors would not spend so much of their time on the rich.

So it's that simple, huh? How stupid must be those who think it's a little more complex than that.

And the solution for climate change and other problems that affect all the countries in the world? Give the United Nations power to handle the problems, as they can only be "governed by a globally respected authority, in a peaceful world abiding by global standards." And we must find smarter solutions. "We must put our efforts into inventing new technologies that will enable 11 billion people to live the life that we should expect all of them to strive for." Sounds great. But just like the story about belling the cat, it's easy to spout off solutions but hard to make them work.

What has Hans Rosling actually done in this regard? He seems mainly to have focused on changing people's thinking in ways that won't really make much difference. He takes great pride, for example, in the fact that the World Bank finally after 17 years and 14 of his lectures to them finally agreed to group countries into 4 levels of development instead of just 2. And in the fact that Sweden now publishes data on its carbon emissions every 3 months instead of just every 2 years. Will these things really help?

I admire Hans Rosling for his tireless efforts over the years to improve the lot of many people, but at the same time, I don't find Factfulness to be the book that others do. Billionaire Bill Gates, for example, gushes about the book, as does his wife Melinda. "One of the most important books I've ever read," he says.

Really? Not me.

I think the writer would have done better making his point by providing more of his personal experiences while traveling abroad. The example of one of his med students hurting her leg by trying to stop an elevator door from closing was an excellent way to illustrate the "be careful of what you think you know" phrase. I also felt that the review of cataclysmic thinking and journalism was a bit willfully naïve; it is not simple human nature that causes journalists to exaggerate and print only the worst...it is their bread and butter. However, the authors intent to remind us all to think rather than just react is a welcome one in the social media age.

The book's main theses: The world is improving and is much better than what most people think. (Though in final chapters the book presents some very big risks to humanity). Following the idea about our successful situation, the author presents a popular cognitive psychology about our inappropriate "instincts" that are responsible for this failure to perceive the right situation and suggests some common-sense rules how to overcome these "instincts". For example, don't refer to one number, such as the number of babies' death, but rather compare it with the data of previous years in order to reveal the trend. The main drawbacks: the book is repetitive, and includes many long stories which contribute very little to the main argument. It could be easily transformed into a short paper.

The prepublication reviews were SO positive, I thought “I just have to read this book!”

I am not yet confident that I made a mistake.

I am fairly confident that there is a serious problem with the book’s core thesis. Sufficiently serious that I may, in the end, completely pan it.

The book begins with a quiz of certain basic facts that the author claims most people do not known. Indeed, most people systematically get the answers wrong, more commonly than would happen by chance. (So they are worse than chimpanzees.

A minor problem is that some of the claims the author offers as incontrovertible facts (most people in the world have a middle income), are arguably false unless one employs a highly dubious meaning of “middle income.

The more serious problem is that the overarching conclusion: things 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 “not as bad as we think they are.”

Let me explain: the authors complain that we too often divvy the world up into the rich and the poor. But that, they claim, is just false.

Well . . . it at all depends. It they mean . . . what the evidence does show . . . that there are fewer people (percentage wise) in extreme poverty or fewer people (percentage wise) who lack access to all medical care (e.g., vaccinations), then they are right. Although understanding that they are right might be some grounds for optimism, it completely ignores that a) the decline in the absolute number of people in poverty is slight, b) the gap between the very rich and what they dub the middle income has exploded, and c) given the ordering of society, what is required for success has increased more quickly than has the ability of most people to take advantage of available opportunities. That is true both between countries and within even very rich ones. Thus, while the top 1% in the US are vastly wealthier than their earlier counterparts, huge swaths of people in the lower middle class have far fewer genuine opportunities than did their parents.

Thus, their book could easily become a way to excuse the poverty and inequality that we do have, and fail to consider the consequence of that inequality (e.g., on human health).

So rather than correct some misperceptions—a very laudable goal—I fear they are substituting a different set of misperceptions that can be used—and almost certainly are being used—to justify enormous disparities in wealth and well-being.

I initially gave it a 2. I lowered it to a 1.

I refuse to finish the book. A waste of my money.

The author makes far too many gloating self-references.

Many of his "facts" are misleading.

I think about my reaction when watching law and order TV shows when the judge demands that the person on the stand: "just answer 'yes' or 'no'. . The problem is that if I follow the judges demands, I will often NOT be telling "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."

Most of these facts are true, if one interprets the terms in some unusual or nonstandard ways.

I want us to base our choices on evidence. This book does NOT help that cause. Shame.

I used to think that people tend to get more and more pessimistic about the future of the world as they grow older. They tend to romanticise the past and feel that it was better then than now. Nowadays, it looks as though pessimism about the future is not necessarily a function of age. The young today despair about climate change, AI destroying jobs, inequality, violence, rising sea levels and the earth being a ‘dirty, polluted planet’. They even aspire for a new home on Mars. I have always looked at all this as an outsider but never shared the pessimism. I have been an optimist about the world when I was young, as well as now, when I am older. But it has always been a tough job arguing with well-educated, well-meaning friends and acquaintances who passionately believe that I am blind to the impending catastrophe. I noticed that it was always the case that they would support their case with ‘many scientists believe so. You are not better than them’ as the clinching argument. I thought that data is the key to resolve this dispute. This made me study and accumulate more and more data to back my optimism about the future. Then I chanced upon Dr. Hans Rosling’s book. It taught me that data alone is not enough. You need a different framework from the pessimists to organize the world to support your case of optimism. Not only just a framework, but new categories to view the world and good old rigorous rational thinking. Needless to say, Dr.Rosling says that things are constantly getting better and better. Not just marginally better, but way better. He supports his conclusions with data available in the public domain and shows us what we need to be watchful about before jumping to conclusions about how dire the present is or the future would be.

Dr.Rosling identifies ten ‘instincts’ in us which make us see reality in much worse terms than it really is. This happens to all of us, however well educated and accomplished we may be. He calls them as follows: 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. Dr. Rosling discusses each one of these instincts by defining it, its real-life examples we can identify with, where we go wrong with it and what we can do so that we can control this instinct. I was particularly enlightened by his discussion of the Gap instinct and so, shall discuss it in a bit of detail here. It will give the reader a flavor of what is on offer in this book.

What is the Gap instinct? It is the tendency to think in terms of two extremes. We normally talk about the world in terms of ‘developing’ and ‘developed’ nations or ‘the North’ and ‘the South’. We used to use terms like ‘first world’ and ‘third world’ in the past, but then it was deemed politically incorrect. Whatever the terms we use, we hear widely from really well-meaning people in the advanced industrial nations (the developed) that the whole world cannot afford to live in the standards of the Western nations. If the 2.7 billion Indians and Chinese live like that, then ‘the planet will go bust’ is a common refrain. Dr.Rosling drops a bomb saying that much of the world is already living the kind of lifestyle that Westerners have been living in the 1970s and 1980s and it has not killed the planet. To explain this, he advances a framework different from the two extremes. He proposes the following framework:

The world lives at four concrete levels. They are called Levels 1 to 4.
At Level 1, a person earns on the average $1 per day. The maximum at this level is just under $2 per day. At this level, the person gets around walking barefoot. cooking food, which is just a grey porridge everyday, over an open fire and spending much of the day fetching water from a mud hole which is an hour’s walk away. He/she and the children sleep on an unclean floor. The open fire’s smoke affects the lungs and often some of the children die young due to this. One billion people live like this in the world today and they are in ‘extreme poverty’.
At Level 2, he earns on the average four times more at $4 per day, with the maximum at just under $8 per day. This level allows him to buy food that he didn’t grow himself, buy footwear and a bicycle, send children to school, use gas to cook and spend only 30 minutes a day to fetch water. He has access to electricity and can buy mattresses to sleep on. But life is insecure and any major illness can destroy his family. About 3 billion people live at this level in the world and they are termed ‘lower middle income’.
At level 3, you quadrapule your income again to $16 per day on the average, with a maximum of just under $32 per day. At this level, you have made it. You have a regular income, impressive savings, running water, a fridge, varieties of food every day and even a motorcycle. However, life is still a bit insecure because a severe accident on the motorbike may deplete your savings in favor of medical bills. This can make your children’s future education in jeopardy. At this level, you take vacations just for the pleasure of it. Roughly two billion people live at this level today and they are ‘the upper middle income’.
Level 4 does not need elaboration. It is where you earn on the average $64 per day onwards. This is the Westerner! He is a rich consumer and has leisure to enjoy. One billion people live at this level today and they are ‘the rich’.

As we can see, 6 billion out of the 7 billion (actually 91% without rounding off) of the world lives in middle income and rich levels already in the world with varying levels of affordability. Not everyone owns a car or a boat or a Leer jet, but they mostly have access to a TV, Gas stove, a personal vehicle, fridge, washing machine etc.. Only 9% of the world lives in really poor conditions today. But even they are fast moving up the ladder as recent history in China and India have shown. Dr.Rosling shows that Life is significantly better for those on level 2 than on level 1, but it’s hard to see that from level 4 unless you know what to look for. This is the reason why most Westerners buy the notion that ‘the rest of the world cannot afford to live like we do’. The Gap instinct obscures our vision to see reality through data.

The discussions on the other instincts are equally thought-provoking. For example, there are still a massive 1 billion people living in extreme poverty. This is bad and tragic. But the ‘size instinct’ must be moderated by viewing this number historically and in relation to other numbers. In 1966, half the world - 50% - lived in extreme povery whereas fifty years later, now, only 9% lives in extreme poverty. So, this should give us hope rather than despair. Similarly, on the ‘negativity instinct’, the author gives a telling example about his own country, Sweden. Dr.Rosling was born in 1948. He says that Sweden was not in Level 4 in 1948. In fact, in 1948, it had only the living standards that pertain in Egypt today. He describes metaphorically that he was born in Egypt, progressed through living in Malaysia and finally reached Sweden only a bit after 1975.

There are many touching examples in the book from Dr.Rosling’s own life as a doctor and serving in places like Mozambique, Angola and India. This book is a great anti-dote for the sustained alarmism of the media, the environmental movement and well-meaning people on the right, the left and the center. It is not just a ‘think positive’ clarion call. Dr.Rosling asks us to be empirical and logical in our outlook and wants us to see all issues in a wider context based on well-substantiated data from research. I see this book as asking us to combat our cynicism about the world based on ignorance with greater critical thinking and more open-mindedness. For example, it is important to be skeptical even when reknowned scientists back global warming theories. We must look for data to back the ideas instead of being dazzled by the resume of the scientist. As someone in NASA said, ‘We trust in God. But all others must bring data’.

A delightful book to read. A must read as well.

This book was gifted to me on audible. In short, it contributes little to a better understanding of the world for anyone with a basic understanding of macroeconomics or empiricism. Pass on this one.

1. I felt the style was childish. For example, the author persists in comparing the reader or particular groups to a theoretical group of chimpanzees (his apparent go-to stand in for random selection) who answer multiple choice questions by grabbing labeled bananas thrown into a cage. Even a rudimentary knowledge of statistical relationships should make it apparent that chimps randomly grabbing bananas is *deterministic* behavior, not random. Continually reporting how this or that group of people "failed to beat the chimps" seems less like a lesson on empiricism and more like an excuse for the author to flex his supposed intellectual superiority. This is a pattern throughout the book.

2. Author makes an extravagant show of examining how subject matter experts wrongly assume expertise in fields outside their domain of knowledge -- even fields that are closely related. This is a completely legitimate observation. However, in succeeding paragraphs and chapters, the author -- a *medical doctor* consistently tries to provide analysis in the domains of economics and statistics. The irony appears lost to this author as is his sense of self-awareness.

3. The main thesis of the book -- that many, uncommonly known things are improving -- is of marginal use at best. One can pick almost any point in history and find a previous point where x condition was worse. As an analogy: the standard of living in Roman times was exponentially better than tribes of nomadic hunter/gatherers. This is not a particularly useful or shocking revelation, nor does it follow that such a relationship existed between the peak of the Roman empire and the next several decades as it fell into decline. Furthermore, by choosing to focus attention solely on specific, statistical improvements, the author precludes discussion of statistical retrogressions or analysis of negative outcomes not measured by statistics. Even mention of the limitations of statistical measurements get short shrift. I didn't feel these were intentional oversights, more like the result of insufficient understanding of economic systems and the cause/effect relationships involved.

I could continue, but hopefully these criticisms make my point sufficiently. One might argue that I'm not the audience of this book -- that the author is speaking to high school students or first-year undergrads -- but, even so, the prevalence of flawed logic and insufficient expertise makes it difficult to recommend. Readers would be better served by reading "Basic Economics" and "Facts and Fallacies" by Thomas Sowell. Similar material presented in a logically consistent fashion.