BOOK REVIEW : Fact or fiction
When Bill Gates says : “ This is one of the most important books I have ever read ,” you need to pay attention ! The book is Factfulness by Hans Rosling where he explains why we are frequently wrong about the world , and more importantly , why things are often better than we think .
Rosling – who sadly passed away due to pancreatic cancer in 2017 – describes how he posed hundreds of factual questions about poverty , population growth , education , gender , violence , energy , the environment , and more to thousands of people over many decades . The questions were simple and none of them were trick questions . Yet most people fared extremely badly .
In the same manner he questioned participants at the World Economic Forum in Davos – central bankers , heads of state , captains of industry . They fared even worse . Each question had three possible answers : A , B or C . Rosling says that had he gone to the zoo and thrown bananas marked A , B or C to the chimpanzees and noted their answers according to
which banana they ate next , you would expect them to score about 33 %. The participants in Davos usually only got about 12 %! In fact , every group of people completing the tests thinks the world is more frightening , violent , dangerous , hopeless and dramatic than it really is .
How can so many people be so wrong about so much ?
As humans we have a defect : our brains are hard-wired with instincts that helped our ancestors survive . It jumps to swift conclusions ; it generalises and responds melodramatically . This was useful thousands of years ago , but today we need to control our dramatic instincts because it prevents us from
seeing the world as it is , which can lead us terribly astray to very bad decisions .
The media capitalises on these instincts . Bad news sells and good news is not really news at all . We are continuously subjected to a never-ending stream of negative news from across the planet : war , famine , recession , tax hikes , diseases , unemployment , stock market crashes , crime , acts of terror , natural disasters . Journalists reporting on flights that did not crash or crops that succeeded would quickly be out of a job . And in South Africa there is more than enough material to fuel our fears and preconceived notions to keep the media gainfully employed . We need to dig
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