Book Review: Factfullness by Hans Rosling
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| The book, Factfullness |
It is said that when someone speaks in Korean you have to hear him or her out. That’s because the structure of Korean sentences is first the subject and then other elements such as objects and last the verb. So you can find out what the subject did finally with the object at the end of the sentence.
This book is pretty much like that.
In the beginning part of the book, probably many people might feel annoyed because of the author’s strong condemning rhetoric which sounds like “You’re wrong!”, “How don’t you know this?” or “You’re ignorant!” I felt uncomfortable for it at first, too. And I thought many media outlets, journalists and activists who were trying to make the better world might be against him, because he was apparently against them in the book.
But I ended up to get inspired and impressive by the author, Hans Rosling.
This book let me understand and acknowledge in how biased way many people, including me, are thinking about the world. People tend to divide the world basically into two, like us and them. As a medical doctor, who was a citizen of Sweden, one of the wealthiest countries, and who had supplied local or tribal communities with medical treatments and researched diseases including Ebola in African countries with the severe poverty, he deserved to point out people’s ignorance about the world.
Dr. Rosling presented ten instincts which make the worldview of the public distorted as below.
1. Gap Instinct
2. Negativity Instinct
3. Straight Line Instinct
4. Fear Instinct
5. Size Instinct
6. Generalization Instinct
7. Destiny Instinct
8. Single Instinct
9. Blame Instinct
10. Urgency Instinct
Some people can assume what each instinct means just with a glimpse of the list. Over all, these are all about discrimination, misleading, unnecessary fear and unopened mind. Misconception is the convergence of all the instincts above. For example — actually this is the main point the author wanted to tell — people, even those who are highly educated, divide the world just into “developed(us)” and “developing(them)”. The us is in the West(or those who living in Western ways), the them is in the rest part of the world. In other words, we think they cannot be like us.
In the very first page, there is a chart and pictures showing that actually the world can be divided into four levels of income, from the extreme poverty(Level 1) to the wealthiest(Level 4). Surprisingly most of the population of the world lives on Level 2 or 3, their circumstances are not bad as much as we think, and they have been improving at a rapid pace.
Unfortunately many companies have missed many opportunities for their business marketing in countries on Level 2 or 3 because of the prejudice that they can’t afford the products, the author claims in the book.
He insisted, more over, international aids and campaigns must put the efforts and funds in the right places based on the right and updated data, not wasting resources on wrong places.
Also he presented some cases in the past that how one wrong decision of the powerful authority or the influencer with misconception could affect on the whole country or community negatively and harmfully. He confessed his lethal fault by his wrong decision when he was in Africa, which caused some people’s death. Lessons from the accident and other experiences drove him to write this book. So he stressed essentially being humble, being open minded and not being stuck in your own knowledge.
Although I totally agree with most part of this book, I disagree with the author in some parts of the book, especially Contamination of the fourth instinct, Fear Instinct part saying about DDT(I might need to read the book, Silent Spring by Rachel Carson) and the radiation leak crisis from the nuclear power plant meltdown in Fukushima, Japan. I can tell this is one of the most controversial parts of this book. Sometimes, no no, in many times, we need to have fear to avoid the greater catastrophe, even though we don’t have the exact data and a case yet proving that it has happened or will happen, I think.
But in times like these, the way of how to see the world presented by this book, whose first edition was released in 2018, could be a good guide of how to react to the pandemic, probably. I wonder if he were still alive, how he would think of Covid-19 pandemic.
This book starts with that “Ten reasons we’re wrong about the world — and why things are better than you think” and ends with the conclusion that “We should be teaching our children humility and curiosity”. I love it. I found out the reason why Bill Gates highly recommended this book.
I pay my respects to the late Dr. Hans Rosling who dedicated his life to make the better world.