A Factful Review of ‘Factfulness’ by Hans Rosling

5 Oct

There are many books that capture the imagination of a certain type of person. And by that, we mean a person prepared to be open enough to drop their guard and embrace a new way of thinking. Factfulness is just one of those.

Now, we must start by saying that we are behavioural economists, and so although we may not have excelled on the questions Hans presents at the start of the book, we did a lot better than Chimpanzees.

Indeed, Hans begins by setting out his thesis in a series of questions designed to tempt people into exposing the bias by which they see the world. And in doing so, he explains how the vast majority of people perform below the 33% that would be expected if Chimpanzees simply guessed the answers.

At this point, the reader has no idea of what’s in store. A few simple questions open up into a completely different view of the world that we all have the possibility to embrace. It is this view that Han believes will help people to focus on what’s important, bring people together and help to have a more ‘possiblist’ view of the world, as he puts it.

The world is improving

To simplify this new way of thinking, Hans draws our attention to the real, comprehensive and untainted stats that explain how the world operates at the most objective level. He moves beyond the hearsay of the media and a human tendency to focus on the exceptions, to present clear evidence showing how the world has progressed over the last few decades. This requires investigating stats collated by well-respected organisations like OECD and The World Bank that are freely available yet rarely visited by the public. And these stats clearly demonstrate how the world has improved in many respects over the last few decades, whether it be life expectancy or education.

It’s not all about positivity

Although it may appear like a feel-good book on the surface, Factfulness turns out to be anything but. Instead, Hans believes we are simply spending too much time focusing on the wrong things or being misled by our appetite for dramatic events from our evolutionary past. But, make no mistake, Hans makes no predictions for a rosy future. Instead, he believes there are many existential crises that threaten humanity. It’s just we aren’t spending enough time considering them.

In fact, he proved to be right. The book was written in 2018, and two years later the first concern on his list, a flu like pandemic, happened. Not to mention the other things that concern him, which appear to be revealing themselves in today’s society.

A wider set of resources

Hans specifies that the book is the summation of all his work and his final attempt to try to change the way people interpret the world. He therefore presents his case in unprecedented detail, referencing many additional online resources. One of these, Dollar Street, presents an encyclopedic look at how people live across the globe. The pictography illustrates an aspect from the book by presenting how income is the most significant factor in the way people lives their lives across the world.

Hans attempts to break the view that countries can be simply bracketed into two categories – developing or developed. Instead, he believes four income levels better illustrate how people live, both within and between countries. It’s a powerful reminder that country stereotypes are often based on extreme events and rarely present the day-to-day realities of how people live.

Moreover, Gapminder, the organisation behind Dollar Street, presents a much broader set of questions than in the book, as well as bubble animations that feature widely in the book.

An inspirational read

Hans hopes the book provides more than just a passing thought, and instead changes the way we all see the world, one person at a time. Yet, he is not so hopeful, having tried throughout his career. And we aren’t either, unfortunately. The book will certainly leave most readers wondering about the future, but societal conditioning is incredibly difficult to change with one book. For this to have a real impact, it would have to percolate through to the areas of society he mentions as contributing to our conditioning.

Ironically, he knows appears to know this too, as his argues urgency is to be avoided. Instead, he believes that slow and systematic action is likely to take the world’s greatest challenges. He highlights this by explaining his approach to climate change, beginning with greater recording of CO2 emissions in Sweden. The book therefore feels a little more like a big hug, combined with a shake, to remind us that it’s all going OK, while jolting us out of our thought patterns.

Overall, this is one of the most interesting reads that anyone with a curiosity about the world can read. We are all blessed to be able to read it. We must therefore finish by acknowledging, as he does, that the book is more than just his genius but the efforts of Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund too. Furthermore, we’d also like to thank Hans for being able to leave this as part of his legacy.