Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

by Hans Rosling

I realized the problem couldn’t simply be that people lacked the knowledge, because that would give randomly incorrect answers—chimpanzee answers—rather than worse-than-random, worse-than-chimpanzee, systematically wrong answers. Only actively wrong “knowledge” can make us score so badly. Aha! I had it! What I was dealing with here—or so I thought, for many years—was an upgrade problem: my global health students, and all the other people who took my tests over the years, did have knowledge, but it was outdated, often several decades old. People had a worldview dated to the time when their teachers had left school. So, to eradicate ignorance, or so I concluded, I needed to upgrade people’s knowledge. And to do that, I needed to develop better teaching materials setting out the data more clearly. After I told Anna and Ola about my struggles over a family dinner, both of them got involved and started to develop animated graphs. I traveled the world with these elegant teaching tools. They took me to TED talks in Monterey, Berlin, and Cannes, to the boardrooms of multinational corporations like Coca-Cola and IKEA, to global banks and hedge funds, to the US State Department. I was excited to use our animated charts to show everyone how the world had changed. I had great fun telling everyone that they were emperors with no clothes, that they knew nothing about the world. We wanted to install the worldview upgrade in everyone. But gradually, gradually, we came to realize that ther...