Review of Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, by Hans Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund, and Ola Rosling.

• Main Author: Richard Goerwitz
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: National Numeracy Network 2019-07-01
• Series: Numeracy
• Subjects: International health; public health; quantitative literacy; critical thinking
• Online Access: https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/numeracy/vol12/iss2/art19

Hans Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund, and Ola Rosling. 2018. Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. (New York, NY: Flatiron Books). 352 pp. ISBN 978-1250107817. Also available in audio and e-book formats. Rosling et al.’s Factfulness is built around a thirteen-question public-health, environment, and population survey that nobody scores well on, not even people who should know better (for example, academics, politicians, diplomats, and business leaders): We all utterly fail to appreciate key ways in which the earth is steadily becoming a better place for people to live. Despite its title, and subtitle, though, Factfulness is not just about positive change. Its other goal is to explore the dramatic, alarmist instincts that make it hard to recognize such change, and to explore why we often fail to distinguish what is frightening, like terrorism, nuclear accidents, and overpopulation, from what is, statistically speaking, actually dangerous, like drunk drivers, diarrhea, and poverty.