What you'll learn
Author and international health professor, Hans Rosling, calls Factfulness “his very last battle in [his] lifelong mission to fight devastating global ignorance.” After years of trying to convince the world that all development indicators point to vast improvements on a global scale, Rosling digs deeper to explore why people systematically have a negative view of where humanity is heading. He identifies a number of deeply human tendencies that predispose us to believe the worst. For every instinct that he names, he offers some rules of thumb for replacing this overdramatic worldview with a “factful” one.
Key insights
- 1 From the layman to the elite, there is widespread ignorance about global trends.
- 2 An outdated, overdramatic view of global affairs is hurting us.
- 3 When we compare extremes, we forget that the majority of people are somewhere in the middle.
- 4 The global consensus is that the world is getting worse—and they’ve got it all wrong.
- 5 Before getting angry over an isolated statistic, find a standard of comparison.
- 6 We can’t stop generalizing, but we can get better at it.
- 7 When we play the blame game, no one wins and nothing gets solved.
- 8 Actions taken from a position of urgency and panic usually cause more problems than they solve.
Similar titles
