Factfulness Ten Reasons Were Wrong About the World Orange Cover Art

'Factfulness: 10 reasons nosotros're wrong about the world – and why things are ameliorate than you think' by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund

• 25 January 2019
• Reading proffer
• gsclibrary

Wellness Social affairs

Here is some news that might surprise you – although life on world is far from perfect, it is improving at a faster rate than we think. Statistics and facts show that, in many areas, today's globe is performing much better than it gets credit for. In a time of shallow emotionalism, quick condemnations, demagogical 'solutions', and of course fake news, 'Factfulness: 10 reasons we're incorrect about the earth – and why things are amend than you think' is salutary reading.

In Factfulness, the authors play a piffling game with their readers, submitting to them 13 questions with multiple-choice answers on issues such as health, literacy, demographics and poverty. The rate of right answers, even in the instance of highly educated people, is staggeringly low, with responses almost always erring on the negativist side.

The authors do not target wilful distortions of the truth so much as the tendency to base opinions on half-truths, negativist assumptions and sheer ignorance. This tendency leads people to give in to a number of what the authors call 'instincts', which go against skillful and sound judgment. The authors distinguish 10 of them that distort our perceptions:

• The GAP instinct , which makes u.s.a. believe that the world is divided into ii: 'them' (the 'developing' globe) and 'united states' (the 'developed' globe). The authors prefer to talk well-nigh four levels of income, which they say give a far better motion-picture show.
• The NEGATIVITY instinct : forgetting how the globe really was earlier. Information technology is non considering some things are bad today that they cannot be improve than they were before! This is a theme oft alluded to past the French philosopher Michel Serres.
• The STRAIGHT LINE instinct : the danger of extrapolating from a known variable. In that location are straight lines of course, but more often lines are curved or Due south-shaped; this is the instance in demographics, for instance.
• The Fright instinct : some of our ancestral fears, justified at the fourth dimension when we lived in caves, still haunt united states of america today even though the state of affairs has radically inverse. And nosotros have a tendency to grossly exaggerate mod threats such as terrorism, compared to other causes of death.
• The SIZE instinct : the tendency to look at individual figures without putting them in perspective. At that place are more than four million infant deaths (for 141 million births) per year in the world today, which is staggering and shocking. Only in 1950 the number was fourteen.5 meg for 97 one thousand thousand births. We likewise tend to expect at individual victims and forget about the many victims who practice non make it on to our TV screens.
• The GENERALISATION instinct: we separate the world into 'them' and 'us' and and so recall of the people in these groups every bit all being the same.
• The DESTINY instinct : best summed upward past the phrase "things never alter".
• The Unmarried PERSPECTIVE instinct : thinking that all problems accept a unmarried cause.
• The BLAME instinct (could too be chosen the 'conspiracy instinct'): it is ever intellectually easier to discover culprits rather than real causes.
• The URGENCY instinct : pushing people to rush for solutions that are "simple, straightforward and… wrong", to quote Einstein! Rosling gives a specially dramatic case of himself giving in to that instinct every bit a young doctor in Africa, with devastating consequences.

Factfulness is a remarkable volume. Written in a lively and straightforward fashion, full of interesting anecdotes, it extols the virtues of basing i'due south opinions on facts and figures rather than on emotions and preconceived ideas. It is being translated into dozens of languages, with over a one thousand thousand copies already sold. Neb Gates described the book equally "one of the most educational books I've ever read". It could be of particular interest to those who have read the works of Steven Pinker, or Nicholas Taleb'southward 'The Black Swan'.

About the author:

Hans Rosling (1948-2017) was a medical doc, professor of international wellness, adviser to the World Wellness System and UNICEF. In 2012 he was listed as i of Time Magazine'south 100 most influential people in the world. Hans died in 2017.

Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Hans's son and daughter-in-police force, were co-founders (with Hans) of the Gapminder Foundation. Ola is a statistician and Anna a designer. Both have worked for Google and won international awards for their work.

If y'all would like to read this book it is available at the Quango Library and can be requested via Eureka

This book review does not necessarily correspond the positions, policies, or opinions of the Council of the European Union or the European Quango.

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Source: https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/documents-publications/library/library-blog/posts/factfulness/

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