I just had my mind blown by the Factfulness book
Factfulness is a book by Hans Rosling with his son Ola and Daughter in Law Anna. I finished it a couple of days ago, and I must say, I’m blown away. My mind is at a loss after realizing how wrong I was about the world. If anything, the book has humbled me into accepting that I had huge misconceptions about the world.
Hans is a professor of international health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, and the founder of Gapminder, a nonprofit that brings global data to life. He found his life’s purpose to educate all of us idiots on the state of the world with reliable data. I’m serious; when I read his book, I left like an idiot, like a stupid fucking idiot.
He loves asking questions such as “How many children are vaccinated in the World?”, “What’s the child mortality rate of X country?” “How many people have electricity in the world?” – after asking such questions and almost 90%-95% of people bombing the answers, Hans loved to make us all feel like idiots by sharing that if he asked Chimpanzees, they would score better just because of pure random probabilities.
Wow! I’m even worse than chimpanzees when it comes to giving correct answers to simple questions about the state of the world. Here’s the problem though it’s not just me, Hans has asked these questions to thousands of people across the world, people who are important and are supposed to make decisions to solve our issues, people with top degrees, people leading banks, people who represent countries at the World Economic Forum, everyone seems to be getting this wrong. With this, Hans rightly concludes that the reason isn’t that we are ignorant or uneducated. The problem is we have wrong biases and notions about the world. Our internal triggers and the need for dramatic sequences are pushing us towards wrong conclusions. The world is doing pretty well, yes there are huge challenges that we all have to work in overcoming collectively, but things are headed in the right direction. All the data he shares is open source and comes from only the most credible organizations. He breaks down the instincts and internal triggers that come into play and appeal to our natural inclination towards dramatic scenarios that cause us to create a very distorted image of the state of the world. I feel this book should be a mandatory read.
It’s an amazing book, one that everyone should read. One quote I like from the book:
To understand most of the world’s significant problems we have to look beyond a guilty individual and to the system.
After he died in 2017, Ola and Anna have been running his Gapminder organization that Hans founded to fight global misconceptions. The Gapminder site has amazing data and tools to upgrade your worldview.
I loved going through their Dollar Street project on the site, showing how people worldwide live based on their income levels.
Hans was an amazing presenter of data, and his talk about Population was an eye-opener. With so many doomsday warnings regarding the “population explosion,” his talk based on data is both a sign of hope and why our focus should be on solving real challenges rather than exaggerating things to create doomsday scenarios.
Thank you, Hans, Ola, and Anna for upgrading my view. You have changed me forever.
Have you read Factfulness? If not, go ahead. Read it today.