I’m an optimistic world citizen and interested in data visualization. Therefore, “Factfulness” the latest and sadly the last book by Hans Rosling has resonated well with me.
“Factfulness” is a manifesto to see the world how the world really is: based on facts and figures and not on how we believe the world looks like. Rosling’s son Ola and his daughter-in-law Anna are co-authors and have visualized the findings based on material from the Gapminder Foundation. Hopefully, most of you will know the Gapminder “bubbles” tool. You can start the animation at the bottom left. The world of your childhood is so much different from today’s world.
Indeed, the “Ignorance project” has shown that experts and people all around the world are wrong about basic facts regarding the development of the world. The book explains why we are so wrong about the state of the earth based on ten very human instincts that build the structure of the book. I like the visualizations of the ten rules of thumb in the book. Nevertheless, I couldn’t resist to share my own sketch (see below). Factfulness principles can be applied by anybody, and are especially important to create smart data that can be understood by humans out of big data generated by machines.
Eventually, the highlight of the book is certainly the “Dollar Street matrix” that shares pictures of the living conditions of more than 250 families across the globe.
