Who should read this book?
Teachers: because we should teach our children about the world in a slightly different way.
Policy Makers: because creating a policy based on wrong assumptions is not what we pay policy makers for.
People engaged in development cooperation: because it will help them get more impact.
People with a general healthy curiosity looking to sharpen their knowledge & critical thinking in order to make better decisions (where to invest, where to expand, how to overcome biases, …). You will get what you are being promised.
Why you should read this book (or not)?
If you have a purpose that is beyond yourself (Me, Myself & I), it is helpful to put things in the right perspective. That will enable you to make better (fact-based) decisions. The problem is we all get it wrong. Terribly wrong. Even policy makers & experts don’t come close to dart-throwing-chimpanzees. Hans Rosling describes in detail & through various examples the root causes and countermeasures. In the meantime, he improves your factual knowledge about our world. The concepts apply far beyond the facts of this book. Reading this book in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, I believe we would have a clearer & more robust strategy if our policy makers would be familiar with these concepts.
Apart from being a very fact-based book, I also value very much the positive message about the world. Various kinds of media overwhelm us with negative messages. The book offers a different perspective on how to world is getting a better and better. Rather than creating naïve hope, Hans Rosling uses anecdotes, trends and sound reasoning to make his point.
Interesting extracts
“Every group of people I ask thinks the world is more frightening, more violent, and more hopeless – in short, more dramatic – than it really is.”
“So how could policy makers and politicians solve global problems if they were operating on the wrong facts? How could business people make sensible decisions for their organizations if their worldview were upside down? And how could each person going about their life know which issues they should be stressed and worried about? (…) Working late one night at the university, I had a eureka moment. I realised the problem couldn’t simply be that people lacked the knowledge, because that would give randomly incorrect answers – chimpanzee answers – rather than worse-than-random, worse-than-chimpanzee, systematically wrong answers. Only actively wrong “knowledge” can make us score so badly.”
“Urgency, fear, and a single-minded focus on the risks of a pandemic shut down my ability to think things through. In the rush to do something, I did something terrible.”
“I was talking to some gynecologists whose job it was to collect data about sexually transmitted diseases in poor communities. These professionals were ready to put their fingers anywhere on people, and to ask them all kinds of questions about their sexual activities. I was interested to know whether some STDs were more common in some income groups, and so I asked them to include a question about income on their forms. They looked at me and said, “What? You can’t ask people about their incomes. That is an extremely private question.” The one place they didn’t want to put their fingers was in people’s wallets.
Some years later, I met the team at the World Bank who organized the global income surveys and I asked them to include questions about sexual activity in their survey. I was still wondering about any relationships between sexual behavior and income levels. Their reaction was more or less the same. They were happy to ask people all kinds of questions about their income, the black market, and so on. But sex? Absolutely not.
It’s strange where people end up drawing their lines and how well behaved they feel if they stay inside their boxes.”
“My best understanding is that the link between climate change and migration is very, very weak. The concept of climate refugees is mostly a deliberate exaggeration, designed to turn fear of refugees into fear of climate change, and so build a much wider base of public support for lowering CO2 emissions.
When I say this to climate activists, they often tell me that invoking fear and urgency with exaggerated or unsupported claims is justified because it is the only way to get people to act on future risks. They have convinced themselves that the end justifies the means. And I agree that it might work in the short term. But.
Crying wolf too many times puts at risk the credibility and reputation of serious climate scientists and the entire movement.”
“Most important of all, we should be teaching our children humility and curiosity. Being humble, here, means being aware of how difficult your instincts can make it to get the facts right. It means being realistic about the extent of your knowledge. It means being happy to say “I don’t know.” It also means, when you do have an opinion, being prepared to change it when you discover new facts. It is quite relaxing being humble, because it means you can stop feeling pressured to have a view about everything, and stop feeling you must be ready to defend your views all the time. “
“A single typo in your CV and you probably don’t get the job. But if you put 1 billion people on the wrong continent you can still get hired. You can even get a promotion.”