Factfulness by Hans Rosling
★★★ Recommended with reservations. Factfulness makes some hugely important points, though I’m not sure this book is the best vehicle for them. I preferred Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now.
Before reading further, take the 5 minute test!
An argument for evidence-based optimism. Factfulness makes the case that the world is better than we think it is. More specifically, it’s actually improving by leaps and bounds over time, despite our perception that everything is going to shit. The fact that people typically get less than 2 out of 12 questions correct in Rosling’s simple test about global trends — much worse than chance — highlights a systematic bias in our perception of the world. This is backed up by other data, like this YouGov survey from 2015:
Rosling was a Swedish physician and statistician who was obsessed with the ignorance of the general population, the media, academics, and even Nobel laureates to the reality of massive global progress in the 20th century. And as a statistician, he attempted to solve this problem with better data and data visualizations, often communicated in live talks. For example, How not to be ignorant about the world. This book is an extension of that work.
Our instinct to notice the bad more than the good is related to three things: the misremembering of the past; selective reporting by journalists and activists; and the feeling that as long as things are bad, it’s heartless to say they are getting better. For centuries, older people have romanticised their youths and insisted that things ain’t what they used to be. Well, that’s true. Most things used to be worse. This tendency to misremember is compounded by the never-ending negative news from across the world.
Stories about gradual improvements rarely make the front page even when they occur on a dramatic scale and affect millions of people. -Hans Rosling in The Guardian
The empirical understanding of macro trends that Rosling champions is absolutely correct, and hugely impactful. If we aren’t able to recognize where we’re making progress and where we aren’t, we can’t make good decisions about what we need to change. This can lead to bad outcomes, like doing away with free trade, immigration, capitalism, or even liberal democracy, while ignoring the real threats to our future, particularly climate change.
Everyone should build a basic understanding of the stunning progress made in the 19th and 20th centuries. A great place to start is by spending 10 minutes reading Our World in Data: The short history of global living conditions and why it matters that we know it.
However, if you watch Rosling’s TED talk and spend some time poking around in Our World in Data, I’m not sure you need to read Factfulness. I found the first couple of chapters interesting, and I could see them being eye-popping for those who aren’t already familiar with the key trends. But I lost interest pretty rapidly after that. Rosling is much more successful at making the case that we misperceive the world than he is at explaining why. His “10 instincts” that mislead us are mostly accurate, but I didn’t find this a very compelling or memorable framework for understanding the human psychology side of things. As an alternative, I’d highly recommend Daniel Kahneman’s amazing book Thinking, Fast and Slow to those interested in understanding more about our cognitive processes and the heuristics that often lead us astray.
I also think Rosling severely underplays equity. While it’s true that absolute measures of health, wealth, education, and freedom are critical to tracking global progress, relative measures matter as well. People’s happiness is tied to how well-off they are relative to their peers, and rich but unequal societies can be less stable, free, and happy than less wealthy societies with more equitable wealth distributions. An exploration of this seems absent from Rosling’s work. I think some recognition of it would help temper his relentless cheeriness.
Finally, I felt the communication style befitted a statistician, and I didn’t find the personal anecdotes very compelling or enlightening. As important as the content is, it’s not clear to me how it can be best communicated at a mass scale. Rosling did a great service by dedicating himself to evangelizing the data, but I worry that there simply aren’t that many people interested in or open to a data-based argument.
All that said, I do think the points made here are critically important, and I have friends who loved the book. For an example of a more positive take, I’d recommend Bill Gates’s post about the book, Why I want to stop talking about the “developing” world.
