Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World and Why Things Are
Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling with Ola Rosling and Ann Rosling Rönnlund
(New York: Flatiron Books, 2018)
The paradigm-shifting ideas in
Hans Rosling’s Factfulness emerge rarely
in one’s lifetime. It’s one of the books you might borrow from the library because
of the great things you’ve heard about it, then renew the loan since you want
to reread the author’s well-reasoned conclusions from irrefutable data, and ultimately
decide it’s worth owning as you’ll find the sage’s arguments useful whenever
you might find yourself in a squabble over issues of healthcare advancements, global
education, social inequality, or human progress.
Rosling fans familiar with his
legendary TED talks know how passionate he was about his subject matter before
his untimely death, which preceded the publication of this book. Factfulness works on multiple levels. It
can be read as a self-test of one’s comprehension of the general welfare of our
planet; as a clearinghouse for worldwide social, economic, educational, and
medical trends; as a guide to research on historical human progress; as an applied
means of understanding where people and nations fit in income levels (mixed),
improvements (high), and world knowledge (abysmally low); and as an
autobiography of Rosling’s illustrious career as a physician, researcher, and
teacher in places as remote as the African outback and hallowed as the
Karolinska Institutet, as well as an engaging presenter on the most prestigious
stages in international affairs.
Rosling was neither liberal nor
conservative, but he surely was practical. Factfulness
cogently explains why nearly everyone distorts the facts. Nuclear power activists
espouse hypocritical and short-sighted agendas. International relief
organizations misrepresent statistics on poverty. Journalists report an
exaggerated story of the world we live in. Politicians cherry pick to drive
self-serving legislation. And we—the guiltiest party—hold on to ten undeniable illusions
that paint for us an outdated, unrealistic picture of how things really are. No
one knows this better than Rosling himself, who on at least three occasions in
the book admits that even he blindly clutched romanticized ideas of the human condition.
His delusions triggered wrongheaded decisions that caused a loss of human life.
The ten collective and
destructive instincts we share, Rosling argues, make us see the world not as it
is but as it was. By pointing out these misjudgments and offering commonsense antidotes
to them, Rosling delivers in his magnum opus a veritable manual for perceiving
the planet we share, and an indispensable resource in changing only those parts
of the world that need changing—starting with our own ignorance.
