Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World - and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
by Hans Rosling
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Bill Gates recommends book in Gates Notes format + animation
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Giving it his “highest recommendation,” Bill Gates describes the fact-based assertion made in the book that the world is actually getting better instead of worse. Accompanied by jazzy background music and colorful drawings that illustrate, in four phases, the improvement in basic things like toilets, houses, and transportation, Gates urges us to tune out non-fact-based indicators highlighted in the news (such as deaths by plane crashes when they fail to cover all the deaths not by plane crashes).
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In one-on-one chat, author explains how world has improved
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Author Hans Rosling tells Britain’s Channel 4 that we need to go “beyond mindfulness” into “factfulness.” First sharing facts about how the world has improved over the last fifty years, he then makes a case for wealthy countries to either welcome migrants or to help the countries from which they come so that potential migrants will be more likely to find quality of life there. He says his native Sweden would be “unbearable” without immigrants and urges his interviewer, as part of the media, to adhere more to facts.
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Animated explanation of Rosling’s thesis that the world is improving
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This short video hits the highlights of Hans Rosling’s Factfulness, demonstrating through animated charts and statistics several major ways in which the world has improved: lower birth rate, lower poverty rate, fewer infant deaths, fewer deaths by natural disasters, and lower crime rate. Rosling attributes our tendency to think that the world is getting worse, not better, to an overexposure to media, to the media’s emphasis on the negative, and to our naturally negative instincts, which we must overcome by gathering accurate information.
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