Factfulness and gapminder

We’ve become fans of Hans Rosling’s book Factfulness and the Gapminder Foundation, with a mission “to fight devastating ignorance with a fact-based worldview”.

Our collective misconceptions about the world we live in are startling. It’s not just that we don’t often know the basics of global poverty trajectory, vaccine rates or population growth, but that what we think we know is often plain wrong.

As an example – In the last 20 years, the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has:

  1. Almost doubled
  2. Remained more or less the same
  3. Almost halved

On average, just 7% of people get this question right (and get just 17% of Hans’ whole test right).

The answer, by the way, is C.

Visit gapminder to upgrade your world view.