Review of Factfulness (Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Hans Rosling, and Ola Rosling, 2018)

Rosling was a Swedish doctor, involved in health care in many “third world” regions. His analysis points to data, readily available through the United Nations and the World Health Organization, that proves that overall public health and standards of living across the world have been steadily increasing over the last hundred years, despite sensational news reports of poverty and disease outbreaks to the contrary. Rosling presents the reader with a questionnaire seeking to set an initial level of assumptions that he proceeds to dismantle with truths that challenge the way we digest and understand information. In a world where we are bombarded with “news” sources of wildly different perspectives and validity, we would be well served to make Rosling’s information analysis “best practices” in Factfulness part of our daily routine.