Review: Factfulness

Factfulness by Hans Rosling
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was expecting to really like this book, given that I'm interested in the topic of how things are better than we think, and given Rosling's interesting TED Talk videos. But I have mixed feelings here. Rosling does present his data on statistics that most people think incorrectly about in an interesting manner. Rosling begins the book by asking an audience about statistics, things like the poverty rate, education of females throughout the world, and the like. Their responses show a worse than random belief in a worst case view of our world. We are all apparently pessimists. Rosling then goes on to debunk these individual statistics, all the while deriding how people think and get these things wrong, while also telling many, many anecdotes about his life. While I found this somewhat interesting, it also felt very similar to three other books I've read recently. The first was another by Rosling, which was mostly autobiographical. In his "How I Learned to Understand the World", he tells many of the same stories that appear here, including some stories of his being a doctor in Africa as well as the story of how his son helped him learn how to present statistics in a way meaningful to more people. These are generally good stories that lay out why Rosling thinks the way he does, but repetitive to (and generally better told in) his other book.

The other two books I read recently that impacting my thinking on this one were Johan Norberg's "Progress" and Matt Ridley's "The Rational Optimist". Both of these books cover similar ground as Norberg, but go beyond in ways that add value to the argument. Ridley covers pessimism over history as well as media's influence in deepening pessimism. I believe Norberg covered more topics.

What I found most interesting, given I've been reading on world optimism a lot recently, is the backstory of how Rosling and son design a way to present the stories. This is even more interesting if you watch some of Rosling's TED Talk videos. His lesson on storytelling for impact is my key takeaway here.

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