Factfulness

Hans Rosling, a Swedish doctor and professor of international health, spent decades testing audiences with simple fact questions about the world: how many girls finish primary school, whether extreme poverty is rising or falling, how many children are vaccinated. He found that most people, including highly educated ones and experts, do worse than chance, and that their mistakes lean the same way: they think the world is more frightening, more violent and more hopeless than it is.

The book explains why. For years Rosling thought the problem was outdated knowledge. He came to believe it comes from ten instincts that served our ancestors well and now distort how we see the world. An introduction sets out the problem. Then one chapter for each instinct (the gap, negativity, the straight line, fear, size, generalization, destiny, the single perspective, blame and urgency) shows how it misleads and offers a rule of thumb to control it. A last chapter, on using these habits in daily life, asks the reader for two qualities, humility and curiosity.

The book is written in Rosling's voice, but he says it is the work of three people: him, his son Ola Rosling and his daughter-in-law Anna Rosling Rönnlund, who together founded the Gapminder Foundation in 2005. Rosling died in February 2017, and Ola and Anna finished the book.

Notes. The numbers in this summary are the book's own figures, from 2017 and earlier. Many have moved since, so read them as the book's picture of that time, not as today's numbers. The English quotes are Rosling's own words, checked against the text of the book. The Dari quotes are our own translation.