500-Word Book Review: Factfulness by Hans Rosling
An easy read providing enough value to be worth your time.
Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World — and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, a combined effort by Hans Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund, and Ola Rosling is a relatively quick and easy read worth your time.
In the book, Rosling condenses the culmination of insights about the world that he’s learnt over the course of his career as a physician and statistician. Rosling explains how the book, “shares with you the conclusions I finally reached — based on years of trying to teach a fact-based worldview, and listening to how people misinterpret the facts even when they are right there in front of them — about why so many people, from members of the public to very smart, highly educated experts, score worse than chimpanzees on fact questions about the world.”
Factfulness orients itself around a series of questions about global progress that Rosling and his team have asked people across the world including leaders, scientists, and politicians — which the majority got incredibly wrong. Questions like:
How many of the world’s 1-year-old children today have been vaccinated against some disease?
A: 20 percent
B: 50 percent
C: 80 percent
