Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About The World - And Why Things Are Better Than You Think

by Hans Rosling

You should not expect the media to provide you with a fact-based worldview any more than you would think it reasonable to use a set of holiday snaps of Berlin as your GPS system to help you navigate around the

The invisible actors behind most human success are prosaic and dull compared to great, all-powerful leaders.

In fact, resist blaming any one individual or group of individuals for anything. Because the problem is that when we identify the bad guy, we are done thinking. And it’s almost always more complicated than that. It’s almost always about multiple interacting causes—a system. If you really want to change the world, you have to understand how it actually works and forget about punching anyone in the face.

Factfulness is … recognizing when a scapegoat is being used and remembering that blaming an

The call to action makes you think less critically, decide more quickly, and act now.

When people tell me we must act now, it makes me hesitate. In most cases, they are just trying to stop me from thinking clearly.

When a problem seems urgent the first thing to do is not to cry wolf, but to organize the data.

The five that concern me most are the risks of global pandemic, financial collapse, world war, climate change, and extreme poverty. Why is it these problems that cause me

also means, when you do have an opinion, being prepared to change it when you discover new facts. It is quite relaxing being humble, because it means you can stop feeling pressured to have a view about everything, and stop feeling you must be ready to defend your views all the time.

I think it will not be long before businesses care more about fact mistakes than they do about spelling mistakes, and will want to ensure their employees and clients are updating their worldview on a regular basis.

Most of what I understand about the world I learned not from studying data or sitting in front of a computer reading research papers—though I have done a lot of that too—but from spending time with, and discussing the world with, other people.