Factfulness
Ratings285
Average rating4.3
It was very resourceful to read this book and to adjust our tendency to bias facts due to exposure in mass media as we are living in the age of technology, fast-spread messages and news, that everything comes in a snap and we absorb them without filtering the knowledge through our brain first.
In my opinion, Hans Rosling has done perfectly well in awing readers with his straight forward and engaging, simple but clear language to deliver us the main theme throughout the book–we shouldn't judge a book by its cover, yet also by the history of humankind. It highlights the point where we should learn to view things in an up-to-date manner, and rather not judged by the fact or so-called leaps in technology advancement we've made–especially for the western countries, that western still dominates the world in a “privileged” way, ahead of all its rivals. Indeed, it continues to emphasise on the misjudge in facts, mostly based on the old facts opinions that were embedded among us and harvested to other ones as we grow up. Our world view is outdated. And yet we shall learn to change our view on that.
It is an incredibly useful book in proving common misconceptions wrong, alongside the facts and the uses of data that helps to establish another new level of understanding in the current global situation. Worthy to read.
Ik kende Rosling en zijn Gapminder software al wat langer, dus (een van) de onderliggende boodschap(pen) - “Het gaat nog helemaal nog niet zo slecht met deze wereld” kende ik al, maar dit boek geeft daarnaast handvatten hoe naar de wereld te kijken.
Diverse menselijke instincten worden beschreven, en hoe die ons denken over de wereld kleuren.
De methode om de wereld in 4 “levels” op te delen vind ik een mooie, met DollarStreet als een erg mooie aanvulling op de al wat oudere bewegende bubble charts.
De samenvattingen van ieder hoofdstuk doen me iets teveel aan zelfhulpboeken denken...
A must-read for all your anti-vax, q-anon, or otherwise radicalized friends and relatives.
I quite enjoyed Rosling's TED talks, and was thoroughly disappointed by this book. Overall found it to be pretty patronizing and misleading. I'd argue that the book isn't following its own advice on multiple fronts. I think the points raised in his TED Talk are still valuable and worth sharing, and would point people to those instead of this book every time.
On my Books Every Human Should Read list. Fascinating, written with expertise, experience and humility. I don't understand all the reviews using the word “condescending” - I didn't see that (with the exception of one rather shocking anecdote from when he was a new graduate). He frequently shares polling data that shows ignorance on the part of highly educated people, but that's the data he's using to reveal the problem. He also freely shared his own mistakes.
Reading at the end of 2022, I was struck by the fact that his number one practical concern (in 2017) was a global pandemic (not that he was the only one - this has long been known to be inevitable). As much as the world could have benefitted from his wisdom in 2020, maybe it's better he didn't see how badly it was handled...
What I enjoyed most was how infinitely practical this was. Lots of charts, the fallacies are presented clearly, and each chapter ends with a bullet point list to solidify the concepts he's described with personal stories. This book is neither boring or clinical, and it's an excellent antidote for the insidious, Western/Euro-centrist thinking that's both prevalent and rarely remarked upon.
If you liked this book and have kids, I'd also recommend Raising Critical Thinkers by Julie Bogart. For more positivity on the world, Humankind by Rutger Bregman, although that one's still in my tsundoku pile.
Very repetitive, but clever.
A lot of points are good but the way the author writes about them gets old really fast.
“Step-by-step, year-by-year, the world is improving. Not on every single measure every single year, but as a rule. Though the world faces huge challenges, we have made tremendous progress. This is the fact-based worldview.”
~
What an eye opening book. An informal read full of interesting information. Before reading this book I would say I had a pretty good grasp on the general trends of the globe, but after reading Factfullness I realized I was basing my opinions and information on outdated facts and I was very far from the truth. The world is doing quite well and Hans does a wonderful job of relaying this idea with different topics and facts. He keeps you engaged and moves through his ideas in an almost story-like manner.
This is data as you have never known it: This is data as therapy.
I want to learn about the world and I want to be aware of the many problems we are running into on a daily basis as the whole of humanity. But it is hard to keep a cool head and remain positive with the onslaught of cynical news and opinions in a time of fast information and highly connected technology. It always seems like the world is just getting worse and worse in a way.
So Rosling's Factfulness sounded like a very interesting and valuable book based on its premise. To use facts and data as proof that the world isn't as bad as we think it is and to alleviate some of that societal cynicism. I was very interested.
But I was also a bit skeptical at first. I was a bit afraid to be running into some guy re-arranging numbers and labels to make real-world problems sound less important or doing a dismissive “numbers don't care about your feelings” shtick which seems to be so popular these days. Luckily, the more I read, the clearer it was that this book is not just data but also filled with a lot of genuine humanity and acknowledgment of real problems in a realistic but also hopeful way.
The book isn't aiming to dismiss certain problems as being less important or not worth worrying about but rather shows statistics to correct certain common misinformation and attempts to add the context that is needed to realize that it's actually going up, not down. Yeah, there is still injustice in the world, wealth isn't spread ideally, climate change is definitely happening, and so on. But, as Rosling writes himself, it's important to remember that it can both be bad and better than it used to be. Acknowledging previous progress is important to keep us motivated to continue to work on these problems and not fall into a fatalistic mindset that everything is already doomed.
Rosling writes a lot about how to read information to prevent toxic assumptions or misinformation through missing context. Being aware of the imbalance between positive and negative stories in the news, simply due to the sensationalistic concept of journalism itself, for example. He talks about the unhelpful instinct to look for someone or something to blame when most problems are more complex than to be caused by a single element. He gives many notes on how to read information better to not lose your own mind.
Each chapter of the book is one tip to get away from that general negativity instinct that most of us have, each paired with a common negative assumption of the world we live in and its respective statistics. Besides the focus on data, Rosling writes in a very human and down-to-earth way. He also has many stories to tell from his personal work as a doctor and statistician, traveling the world all over, that make the text more engaging.
There are one or two little moments where I'm not quite on the same page as Rosling, but overall I found this book to be very informative and pretty charming. Rosling is clearly very passionate about the world we live in and he is even more passionate to spread his hopefulness and confidence for a better future with other people.
The fact that he worked on this book up until the very end of his life, still making notes and adjustments to the text while literally on his death bed, is also proof that this meant a lot to him.
While this book surely won't be a complete anxiety relief, it does provide a lot of very helpful ways to better deal with the daily news and do our part with less fear and worry.
This is one of the most important books I have read. I felt that the book started off rather dramatically and it made claims that raised my eyebrows. As I progressed through the book, I saw how it built a framework that can be used to measure stories and view the world. It's not perfect. It's not easy. It's not even possible to be aware of it all the time. Still, it's there and with practice, the framework promises a list of biases that hide the world from us. More importantly, the framework gives us tools that helps us uncover the truth from those who deliberately hide it.
It's hard to overstate the importance of such a framework that enumerates the biases that hides the facts in plain sight. Don't expect the book or the framework to be perfect. Just expect it to be useful.
Professor of International Health Hans Rosling shares what he has learned about what people think they know about global trends about longevity, girls in school, the world's population, poverty, deaths from natural disasters, electrification, and endangered animals; everything people think they know, he tells us, is wrong. In all of these measures of quality of life, things are getting better than we think.
And why are we so wrong about these things? He tells us about ten instincts that greatly distort our perspective, including our tendencies to take in information from media where fear is the driving force behind much reported, to divide the world into two extremes instead of looking at the middle ground, and to believe things are getting worse rather than better.
A fascinating book. Thank you to all who recommended this book to me.
I disliked this book when I've started reading it, specially due to its condescending tone, but the last chapters have changed my mind.
What is Factfulness about? The world can be bad and getting better at the same time. We tend to have an overdramatic worldview, which may affect our decisions and might get us stressed and worried about the wrong things.
I believe that I tend to avoid most of the dramatic instincts referred in the book. However, I have a very strong negativity instinct which kept me having internal discussions with the author and I'm still not convinced about some of the issues, namely the extreme poverty/ poverty question.
I mostly enjoyed learning about the four levels of income as I had an outdated view of the world and was still splitting it into developed and developing countries.
In this approach, the world is divided in four income level:
- Level 1: People living with less than 2 $/day
- Level 2: People living with 2 - 8 $/say
- Level 3: People living with 8-32 $/day
- Level 4: People living with >32 $/day
Although it is very comforting to know that only 10% of the world population is living in level 1 - Extreme poverty - I have trouble seeing “most people are living on the two middle levels, where people have most of their basic human needs met” as exciting news. Why? Because all 3 levels are below what is considered the US poverty line, which means that 86% of the world population is living under this line.
I do understand that is a huge difference between the 3 levels of income, specially for the people living in level 1, and I do see the evolution of people living on those levels as a positive fact that should be celebrated. My main question is: if the world keeps getting better when is the extreme poverty line going to be reviewed? When there is no more people living in level 1?
As you can see, my negative instinct is prevailing in this subject and I will keep trying to learn more about this.
Another issue for me was the question regarding the critically endangered species. In 1996 tigers, giant pandas and black rhinos were critically endangered and today they are not. This does not mean the world is getting better, this means that awareness and the measures taken to protect these species have worked.
By using this information the author is playing with the data to support his view, as all the bad guys referred in the book do. There is no more information regarding animal conservation on the book and the main purpose was to explain that it is possible to change the course of the events. However, the questionnaire was used to show that the world is a lot better than we might think, and by using the change on the conservation status of theses species the readers might be led to believe the same is happening in other species when it is not truth.
Between 1997 and 2020 the number of threatened species has increased. In the latest version for 2020, more than 15,400 animals were listed as threatened - almost double the number of 2007
(https://www.statista.com/chart/17122/number-of-threatened-species-red-list/).
I'm struggling between the 3 and 4 stars but I do recommend the book.
The book was great. It showed me of how wrong I was about many things. And also that I am not alone.
I am also guilty of thinking in labels like developed and undeveloped world - even though the large majority is somewhere in between. It is eye-opening and also reminds us to constantly check our knowledge about the world. With the Internet, we have access to everything within seconds and we should take advantage of it.
Guter Ansatz. Die globale Welt macht eine globale Bildung nötig, die die Dinge sieht, wie sie sind. Eigentlich trivial, aber noch lange nicht weit genug in den Bildungseinrichtungen etabliert. Statistik als Therapie haben wir alle nötig.
Das Buch hat leider kaum Reflexion über seine eigenen Prämissen und Werte, die dem eher optimistischen Blick auf die Welt zugrunde liegen. Hier liegt ein recht klassisches Fortschrittsdenken zugrunde, das aus dem 18. und 19. Jahrhundert kommt: Ökonomischer Fortschritt, technischer Rationalismus etc. wird zu einer „glücklichen Welt“ führen. Fragen der „Kultur“ fallen dabei unter den Tisch. Wer Kulturpessimist ist wird durch das Buch nicht glücklicher. Nur weil es mehr Gitarren gibt, mehr Kinofilme und wissenschaftliche Publikationen pro Jahr, heißt das nicht, dass es aufwärts geht mit Kultur und Wissenschaft. Hier wird implizit Quantität als einziger Wert vorausgesetzt.
Dennoch: Für den nicht-geistigen Bereich des Menschen kann man seinen Blick optimieren mit diesem Buch.
Entertaining, enlightening, if somewhat repetitive book which illustrates quite conclusively that most of us live with a very outdated view of the world, reinforced by media desperate to get our attention by dramatizing and sensationalizing stories that distort the slow steady improvement in key areas. One eye-opening example: that the number of people in the world in extreme poverty is now down to 800 million. The book is full of such facts, and it isn't a rose-tinted view. The authors don't ignore the negative, they just balance it against the inescapable positives of slowly improving circumstances. Recommended.
“The scary world: fear vs. reality. The world seems scarier than it is because what you hear about it has been selected—by your own attention filter or by the media—precisely because it is scary.”
Love his perspective in those books. A real eye-opener for me indeed.
Excellent. Very helpful way to look at numbers and data, and very useful insights. Easy read, too.
Moc doporučuju, zvlášť jestli vás jako mě stresují zvěsti konce světa kvůli ekokrizi atakdále
A wonderful positive outlook of the world which we forget to see. This will change the way you look at other countries, cultures and people. There is no us and them, we are all going through the same journey, but we are all in different stages of it. I would definitely recommend this book to everyone, more so for anyone who grew up in a high earning or Level 4 country.
This book is very frustrating at times but overall the message is great and made me think and that's all I can ask for I suppose.
My main complaints are..
I almost dropped it in the first half because of the constant baffling preconceived (and racist) notions he keeps mentioning european/american people particularly his students have. For a while it seemed very aimed at a western audience in that regard but I'm glad a stuck with it. Though it really opened my eyes on how ignorant the average western person is about “non-western” countries. Ironically the chapters that were meant to make the (western) reader think “oh things aren't so bad in the world over!” made me despair for the western world lol anyway...
Second thing is a lot of the “things are better than you think!” talk is..semantics. For example he says most of the word is middle class and a small part of the population is actually extremely poor! Sounds great until you read his definition of middle class which sounds like hell lol. Or the talk about how certain things like vaccination rates or percentage of girls getting an education for example are getting higher. Well duh, they weren't about to go lower?
This all makes it sound very negative and yet I give it 4 stars. I agreed with the bulk of what he said and the core message of fact checking and not falling into what he calls a dramatic word view. We're getting an overload of skewed info everyday and it's important to actually sit down and cross check before falling into hopelessness. And then fall into it anyway probably because the world really is kinda fucked. Just a bit less so thank you might think.
Two main takeaways from this book:
* Developing/Developed world categorization is bullshit - instead divide the world into four levels of income.
Level 1 (poorest) - approx. 1 billion people
Level 2 (lower-to-middle income) - approx. 3 billion people
Level 3 (middle-to-upper income) - approx. 2 billion people
Level 4 (richest) - approx. 1 billion people
* Dollar Street - an amazing idea of seeing people living the same kind of life across countries on the same income level. So keep in mind that affluent Africans are living as lavishly as affluent Americans and poorest Indians the same as poorest French, on an equal basis of income.
Despite some reservations, I would recommend this to my pessimist friends who think that the world is just doomed. It probably is - but it's also getting better.
In its essence ‘Factfulness' is a book about reading and interpreting data. It tries, and arguably succeeds, in even making it interesting. I believe everyone in the general public should actually read it. General public here is intended by me, as personally I found many of its parts either obvious or repetitive to my earlier experiences or readings.
All in whole, a strong position aiming at questioning your own beliefs and trying to approach the world looking at it from various angles. And I hope I don't have to say how important that is.