Ross Blocher's Reviews > Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

Factfulness joins the ranks of worldview-changing books I heartily recommend to everyone. It offers an updated global perspective on economic development, health, and other key markers of wellness. One of the myths Rosling (and his co-authors Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund) sets out to dispel is the notion of "developing nations" versus "the developed world". Those categories cause us to picture the world as a collection of "haves" and "have-nots" with a large gap in between. This might have been the case in 1965, but is not relevant to today's world, and the media have done a poor job of updating our understanding. Rosling demonstrates this progress with data and recommends an alternate model, parsing populations in terms of four economic levels, irrespective of which country they exist in:

- Level 1 is extreme poverty, barely surviving on $2 per day or less. At this level you are likely barefoot, eating a diet of a simple dietary staple that lacks the full complement of nutrition you need. You walk long distances for dirty water, you cook your food on a basic wood fire, and sleep on a mat on the ground.
- Level 2 finds you still in poverty, but with $4 per day you enjoy a markedly different daily experience. You'll have basic shoes and can even save up for a bike, you'll be cooking with gas, will have a slightly varied diet, your family will have a toothbrush to share and and a mattress to sleep on.
- Level 3 (up to $16 per day) allows you to access running water, the chance at saving up for a motorcycle, cooking on a basic stove, enjoying a varied diet and a lack of food insecurity, a frame to put your mattress on, and everyone in the family gets their own toothbrush.
- Level 4 (up to $32 per day and beyond) membership means you can buy a car, have water running in your own house, your stove and oven are fixed appliances, you have a nutritious and varied meals, sleep in a nice bed, and your family's toothbrushes might even be electric.

These levels are consistent no matter where you live, and each country has a mix of residents from these levels, though the averages change. Only a billion of the world's population suffer in level 1 conditions (terrible, but a marked improvement from the past), some 3 billion live in level 2, 2 billion in level 3, and 1 billion in level 4. If we start to think in these categories, we can be more strategic in our aid, but also in supporting growing markets: many companies don't realize there's so much room for expansion in these "undeveloped" countries.

Rosling begins the book with a 13-question quiz to gauge your knowledge of global vaccination, literacy, health, education, etc, and this review may already have primed you to perform better than most audiences he has encountered (and if you're familiar with Steven Pinker's excellent book Enlightenment Now you'll be even better primed). Funny enough, it's often the most educated audiences that have the worst intuitions about the world in these terms. Rosling regularly compares everyone's performance to that of chimpanzees, just to show that our intuitions are often worse than blind guesswork.

The book is organized into chapters addressing instincts that lead us to think wrongly about the world, and Rosling uses data and anecdotes from his decades of work as an international doctor/researcher to reset our intuitions. There are ten instincts addressed: gap, negativity, straight line, fear, size, generalization, destiny, single perspective, blame, and urgency. I will resist spelling them out here, but they are valuable heuristics for evaluating what we see and hear. Rosling is hoping that, by being aware of our limitations and knowing which questions to ask, we will live lives based on "factfulness": the stress-reducing habit of only carrying opinions for which you have strong supporting facts.

Sadly, Hans Rosling died of pancreatic cancer before this book was released. It was written as a joint effort with his son Ola and daughter-in-law Anna, co-founders of the Gapminder Foundation that pulled together many of the statistics used here. They completed it after his death, but it is written in his voice: serving as a final message to the world from a remarkable educator and human being.

Silly side note: In my Christian upbringing, there was a popular praise song, Take My Life, with the lyrics: "Faithfulness, faithfulness is what I long for / Faithfulness is what I need / Faithfulness, faithfulness is what you want from meeee...." As you progress through the song, you swap out holiness, righteousness, and anything else your worship leader feels like throwing in. Every time I see this book, my mind starts automatically singing this song with "Factfulness". My friend Carrie (who gifted the book to me) said she did the same thing.