Monday 30 April 2018

FACTFULNESS – why things are better than you think?






When I read a good book I have this urge to share it with the world and when I hear about a good book I get impatient. So when none less than Bill Gates recommended this book I had to get my hands on it.......and I finished it in two days! FACTFULNESS is a book like no other, and when it comes from a Bibliophile like me, who reads everything from poetry to Times Classified, you would advised to take me seriously. On its cover the book boldly declares the author’s objectives: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World-and Why Things Are Better Than You Think 


Written by Dr. Hans Rosling, a professor of international health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, this is a book about statistics and it shatters so many myths that after completing the book you are bound to be transformed into a far more optimistic person! Bestselling books about statistics are as rare as unicorns. If it becomes the No 1 bestseller it surely is as rare as a lunar unicorn. Factfulness by Hans Rosling is that moon-based creation.


I knew the author from his inspiring Ted talks https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen 

His first such talk thrust him into the international spotlight in 2006. In 2015, the Swedish professor asked an audience that included heads of state, titans of industry and a former UN secretary-general three multiple-choice questions about poverty, population growth and vaccination rates. To his delight — and dismay — they scored worse than average. Rosling’s well-educated audience in Davos did not know that the world’s average life expectancy is 70, that 88 per cent of children are vaccinated against disease or that in 2100 there will be 2 billion children below the age of 15 — the same number as today! Apart from in Africa, fertility rates have fallen so fast that populations have stabilised almost everywhere on Earth. One of Rosling’s favourite statistics is that Muslim Bangladeshi women have fewer children than Christian/atheist women in Sweden!  


Dr. Rosling left us for his heavenly abode on February 7, 2017. He was billed as the man in whose hands data would sing. The statistician in him was more likely to illustrate an idea with a few multi-coloured lego bricks than a PowerPoint presentation. In his lifetime had been described as everything from a data guru to a Jedi master of data visualisation. Rosling liked to call himself an “edutainer”. A talented presenter, whose signature animated data visualisations have featured in dozens of film clips, the statistician used humour and often unlikely objects such as children’s toys, cardboard boxes and teacups to liven up data on wealth, inequality and population.


FACTFULNESS has a very simple message - the vast majority of us get it wrong about the state of the world. We think it is poorer and unhealthier, more dangerous and violent than it actually is. The book explains how media bias, ideological preconceptions and statistical illiteracy makes most people believe in a gloomy and spectacularly wrong worldview. The book carefully explains by data and vivid examples how positive developments are systematically underreported, while disaster news is vastly over-reported. Rosling categorise the 10 most important sources of bias and misconceptions, some basic human instincts like fear, negativity, blame etc which caused a negative outlook of the world. He also carefully explained strategies on how to avoid them and develop an optimistic outlook.  


Our distorted picture stems partly from having media that inevitably report on tragedies such as starvation, war and school shootings, and from charities that accentuate the negative. Without ever dismissing suffering, Dr. Rosling argues that we need to keep two ideas in our heads simultaneously: things can be bad but they are also improving. In one provocative chapter, he celebrates the fact that “only” 4.2 million babies died last year, calling the number “beautifully small”. In 1950, when the population was much smaller, there were 14.4 million dead babies. We have made huge progress.


In the Chapter on ‘gap instinct’ Dr. Rosling debunks the Mega Misconception that “The World Is Divided in Two”. He goes on to how irresistible temptation we have to divide all kinds of things into two distinct and often conflicting groups, with an imagined gap—a huge chasm of injustice—in between. It is about how the gap instinct creates a picture in people’s heads of a world split into two kinds of countries or two kinds of people: rich versus poor, developed versus developing west versus east and so on


Factfulness is the product of his master craftsmanship of presenting the truth behind a deluge of data. He has in this book helped us identify where things are getting better and encourages us to counter the mainstream media’s agenda of doom and gloom and spread the message of improvement. This way the book and its author helps us to see the world more objectively and overcome the easy cynicism that so easily creeps into our way of thinking. The world has made huge progress which needs to be appreciated because only then we can look at a bad situation, which was worse once, and plan to improve it in future. This is the world view of a ‘possiblist’, one who believes that things could get batter and not that things will get better! Dr.Hans Rosling was a perfect ‘possiblist’.


Some of the statistics that Dr. Rosling produced were absolutely mind boggling. He categorized people by their income levels and emphasized the commonality that exists in each such level irrespective of where they live. Thus he has shown that people tend to buy shoes and bikes when they double their income from $ 2 to $ 4 a day irrespective of where they live – in the outskirts of Kinshasa or in the slums of Dhaka. So he went ahead to organize people along how they lived instead of where they lived and that way it was impossible for anyone to miss the progress made. His knack for presentation and delight in statistics come across on every page. Who else would choose a chart of “guitars per capita” as a proxy for human progress?


This is tremendously readable non-fiction.  It is well-researched, well-written, and organized for ease of learning, with honesty, humor, and personal perspective. The 354 page book is published by Flatiron Books and it costs Rs. 304.00 in Flipkart. The Kindle price is $ 4.21 and the hard cover is for $ 16.79. The PDF can be downloaded from https://soundcloud.com/free-ebooks/pdfepub-download-factfulness-by-hans-rosling-e-book

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