Bill Gates said that this is
“
one of the most important books I’ve ever read―an indispensable guide to thinking clearly about the world.”
Barack Obama says that "
Factfulness
by Hans Rosling, an outstanding international public health expert, is a hopeful book about the potential for human progress when we work off facts rather than our inherent biases."
When some citizens from the US and Sweden were asked to guess how they imagine life in "low-income" countries, they guessed numbers based on data 30 to 40 years ago, Actually, the World Bank changed the dated terminology of "developing countries" from Rosling's recommendation. Questions on life expectancy, overpopulation, climate change and education are skewed too, against all facts.
Why are these facts disregarded by many people?
In
Factfulness
, Professor of International Health and global TED phenomenon Hans Rosling, together with his two long-time collaborators, Anna and Ola, offer a radical new explanation of why this happens. They reveal the "ten instincts that distort our perspective―from our tendency to divide the world into two camps (usually some version of
us
and
them
) to the way we consume media (where fear rules) to how we perceive progress (believing that most things are getting worse)."
• The Gap Instinct: We tend to divide things into 2 distinct groups and imagine a gap between them.
• The Negativity Instinct: We tend to instinctively notice the bad more than the good.
• The Straight Line Instinct: When we see a line going up steadily, we tend to assume the line will continue to go up in the foreseeable future.
• The Fear Instinct: We tend to perceive the world to be scarier than it really is.
• The Size Instinct: We tend to see things out of proportion, over-estimating (a) the importance of a single event/person that’s visible to us, and (b) the scale of an issue based on a standalone number.
• The Generalization Instinct: We tend to wrongly assume that everything or everyone in a category is similar.
• The Destiny Instinct: We tend to assume that (a) the destinies of people, cultures, countries etc. are predetermined by certain factors, and (b) such factors are fixed and unchanging, i.e. their destinies are fixed.
• The Single Perspective Instinct: We tend to focus on single causes or solutions, which are easier to grasp and make our problems seem easier to solve.
• The Blame Instinct: When something goes wrong, we instinctively blame it on someone or something.
• The Urgency Instinct: We tend to rush into a problem or opportunity for fear that there’s no time and we may be too late.
For the latest data on
Agriculture and Food Security, Climate Change, Economic Growth, Education, Energy and Extractive, Environment and Natural Resources, Financial Sector Development, Gender, Health, Nutrition and Population, Macroeconomic Vulnerability and Debt, Poverty, Private Sector Development, Public Sector Management, Social Development, Social Protection, Labor &Trade and Urban Development, click on the link below.
