Perhaps the most shocking fact this book reveals, for me, was how many people truly seem to believe the world is in a worse state than it was decades, or even centuries, ago. Factfulness is a highly-accessible, informal read in which the author frequently delights at the progress made across the globe. Mr Rosling is indeed passionate about his work. If you are unmoved by his son’s final words, then you are a much stronger person than I am. Not because there aren’t issues with it - there are - but because this was Rosling’s last passion project that he completed while battling through his final months with pancreatic cancer. It is not easy to say anything bad about this book.

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 and empower you to respond to the crises and opportunities of the future. 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. That doesn’t mean there aren’t real concerns. It turns out that the world, for all its imperfections, is in a much better state than we might think. Our problem is that we don’t know what we don’t know, and even our guesses are informed by unconscious and predictable biases. They reveal the ten instincts that distort our perspective-from our tendency to divide the world into two camps (usually some version of us and them) to the way we consume media (where fear rules) to how we perceive progress (believing that most things are getting worse).

In Factfulness, Professor of International Health and global TED phenomenon Hans Rosling, together with his two long-time collaborators, Anna and Ola, offers a radical new explanation of why this happens.

So wrong that a chimpanzee choosing answers at random will consistently outguess teachers, journalists, Nobel laureates, and investment bankers. When asked simple questions about global trends- what percentage of the world’s population live in poverty why the world’s population is increasing how many girls finish school-we systematically get the answers wrong. Factfulness: The stress-reducing habit of only carrying opinions for which you have strong supporting facts.

Books by hans rosling