When I was in middle or early high school, among the best and densest nuggets of my education was the World in Figures pamphlets published by The Economist. These came out around Christmas time each year, were the height and width of a travel brochure, and had hundreds of tables of rankings. Some were familiar (tallest mountains, longest rivers), some you would expect to see (all countries by GDP PPP per capita), and some you wouldn't (vaccination rates, most beer consumed).
Factfulness reminds me a lot of that pamphlet, but with the Roslings spelling out a few morals that ought to be evident to anyone spending time with the data.
First and foremost, the world is better than you think. When asked basic multiple-choice questions about global life expectancy, vaccination rates, girls' educational attainment, people on average do worse than monkeys guessing randomly. For example, given the question, "In the last 20 years, the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has _________," and three possible answers, "A. Doubled, B. Stayed roughly the same, C. Halved," only 10% of respondents answered correctly, "C. Halved." Other questions also show a clear bias towards pessimism, or perhaps underestimating developing countries. Embarrassingly, when Hans Rosling asks similar questions of Davos attendees and Nobel laureates, he finds they often do even worse than average people.
Other notables of the book:
- My understanding is that the book was written in English, despite all the authors being native Swedish speakers. Despite this barrier, I thought it was more readable than the average pop social science book. The prose is plain, but there is some clever wordplay (e.g., "difficult math" is used to describe a census of infant mortality in Mozambique).
- Hans was dyslexic.
- In a chapter on assigning blame, there is an anecdote about syphilis. Russians called it the "Polish disease," the Polish called it the "German disease," the Germans called it the "French disease," and the French called it the "Italian disease." The chain ends there, as Italians returned the favor by calling it the "French disease." The Roslings used this as a parable of the instinct to assign blame on a particular group, and clearly it is ridiculous to suppose that all of these names could be right. However, syphilis was undocumented in Europe before Columbus' voyage to the New World. The scapegoating clearly tracks backwards from Eastern to Western Europe. Might the local names accurately reflect the trade routes along which the disease travelled?
- Hans' viral Ted talk about the magic washing machine gets a retelling, and yes it did very nearly make me cry.
