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

by Hans Rosling

Yet here’s the paradox: the image of a dangerous world has never been broadcast more effectively than it is now, while the world has never been less violent and more safe.

Fears that once helped keep our ancestors alive, today help keep journalists employed.

Get calm before you carry on. When you are afraid, you see the world differently. Make as few decisions as possible until the panic has subsided.

“In the deepest poverty you should never do anything perfectly. If you do you are stealing resources from where they can be better used.” Paying too much attention to the individual visible victim rather than to the numbers can lead us to spend all our resources on a fraction of the problem, and therefore save many fewer lives.

The world cannot be understood without numbers. And it cannot be understood with numbers alone.

the main factor that affects how people live is not their religion, their culture, or the country they live in, but their income.

when presented with new evidence, we must always be ready to question

our previous assumptions and reevaluate and admit if we were wrong.

The Idea of a Husband At a banking conference in Hong Kong, I was seated at dinner next to a brilliant young banker. She was 37 years old and enjoying a very successful career, and she taught me many things over dinner about current issues and trends in Asia. Then we started talking about our personal lives. “Do you plan to have a family?” I asked. I didn’t mean to be rude: we Swedes (nowadays) like to talk about these things. And she had no problem with my honest question. She smiled and looked over my shoulder at the sun setting over the bay. She said, “I am thinking about children every day.” Then she looked me straight in the eye. “It’s the idea of a husband I can’t stand.”

Afterward, the Afghan students wanted to tell me about their country. They told me these changes were already slowly happening even in Afghanistan. “Despite the war, despite the poverty,” they told me, “many of us young people are planning a modern life. We are Afghans, we are Muslim women. And we want a man just like you describe, a man who listens and plans together with us,

and then we want two children who go to school.”

The macho values that are found today in many Asian and African countries, these are not Asian values, or African values. They are not Muslim values. They are not Eastern values. They are patriarchal values like those found in Sweden only 60 years ago, and with social and economic progr...

Forming your worldview by relying on the media would be like forming your view about me by looking only at a picture of my foot. Sure, my foot is part of me, but it’s a pretty ugly part. I have better parts. My arms are unremarkable but quite fine. My face is OK. It isn’t that the picture of my foot is deliberately lying about me. But it isn’t showing you the whole of me.

constantly test your favorite ideas for weaknesses. Be humble about the extent of your expertise. Be curious about new information that doesn’t fit, and information

from other fields. And rather than talking only to people who agree with you, or collecting examples that fit your ideas, see people who contradict you, disagree with you, and put forward different ideas as a great resource for understanding the world.

The world cannot be understood without numbers, nor through numbers alone. A country cannot function without a government, but the government cannot solve every problem. Neither the public sector nor the private sector is always the answer. No single measure of a good society can drive every other aspect of its development. It’s not either/or. It’s both and it’s case-by-case.

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.