Factfulness: Book Review
Do we know the world we live in? If yes, can you answer the following questions?
- In the last 20 years, has extreme poverty doubled, remained same or halved?
- What percentage of girls finish primary school across the world?
- Have natural disasters increased or decreased over the last 100 years?

You will most certainly have the answers to the above questions by the end of this article.
Hans Rosling asks 10 more questions in his book to test the reader’s macro-level understanding of the world economy, population growth, health indicators, among others. He observes that a majority of the people including experts, scientists, policy makers, Nobel Laureates, etc. seem to be getting these questions wrong. Interestingly, he finds that chimpanzees perform statistically better.
Ignorance is not bliss
The book acts as an eye-opener and exposes our society’s ignorance through use of colourful bar graphs, bubble-charts, so on (The tools can be found on www[dot]gapminder[dot]org).
Rosling talks about 10 instincts that are intuitively built in our heads and distort our perspective of the world — gap, negativity, fear, size, blame, so on. Due to gap instinct, we often try to categorise things into two groups — for instance, the classification of our world as developed and developing. According to him, such a categorisation presents an inaccurate view of our world and instead suggests categorisation based on income per day. Similarly, negativity instinct leads us to dramatise everything that is bad while overlooking slow and incremental yet positive progress in society such as poverty reduction. Media too exploits the negativity instinct to exaggerate bad events and thereby, presenting a gloomy picture of the world we live in.
The world is getting better
Rosling observes that positive news is everywhere, and we have to actively look for them, in news as well as statistics. The world is a much better place than we think. Our society has made substantial progress over the years. For example, the global average life expectancy is 70 years, gender gap in education is almost disappearing, natural disasters have reduced to less than half, so on. At the same time, Rosling warns us about getting complacent. We still need to overcome problems such as climate change.
He gives an interesting analogy with a sick baby to see how the world is getting better.
Think of the world as a very sick premature baby in an incubator. After a week, she is improving, but she has to stay in the incubator because her health is still critical. Does it make sense to say that the infant’s situation is improving? Yes. Does it make sense to say it is bad? Yes, absolutely. Does saying “things are improving” imply that everything is fine, and we should all not worry? Not at all: it’s both bad and better. That is how we must think about the current state of the world
However, there are certain shortcomings in the book. Rosling talks about progress but talks little about the rate of progress. For example, poverty has drastically reduced in the last two decades, but could it have been done faster? Rosling’s tendency towards oversimplification is hard to miss. For example, the parameters used to judge human progress such as number of guitars per capita are debatable. The graphics are small, and in black and white (understandably, in the interest of affordability) unlike his TED talks where they are more appealing and lively.
Nevertheless, Factfulness builds critical thinking skills and encourages fact-based world view. It gives reason for optimism in today’s world despite reports of — war, violence, disasters, rich getting richer and poor getting poorer, among others. Notwithstanding the use plenty of data and statistics, Rosling’s narration is excellent and keeps the reader engrossed throughout.
The article was originally published in Foundation for Democratic Reforms (FDR)’s monthly newsletter.
