Factfulness: The stress-reducing habit of only carrying opinions for which you have strong supporting facts.
When asked simple questions about global trends - why the world's population is increasing; how many young women go to school; how many of us live in poverty - we systematically get the answers wrong. So wrong that a chimpanzee choosing answers at random will consistently outguess journalists, Nobel laureates, and investment bankers.
In Factfulness, Professor of International Health and a man who can make data sing, Hans Rosling, together with his two long-time collaborators Anna and Ola, offers a radical new explanation of why this happens, and reveals the ten instincts that distort our perspective.
It turns out that the world, for all its imperfections, is in a much better state than we might think. But when we worry about everything all the time instead of embracing a worldview based on facts, we can lose our ability to focus on the things that threaten us most.
Inspiring and revelatory, filled with lively anecdotes and moving stories, Factfulness is an urgent and essential book that will change the way you see the world.
Factfulness examines the false beliefs that affect the way we perceive the world. Whether it's global poverty, epidemics, war, or terrorism, we have a tendency to have a dramatic, pessimistic perspective on the world, believing that things are the worst they've ever been and only going to get worse.
But this viewpoint is untrue. There has never been a better time to be alive than now, by practically any metric. The book explains the ten tendencies that cloud our perception of global issues and provides ways to get over them so that we can replace our dramatic worldview with a factual one.
There’s no room for facts when our minds are occupied by fear.
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