Numbers are important, but they shouldn't be used on their own to draw conclusions. It's important to consider other points of view, and not to trust any one view (even from an expert). 'Slow change is not no change', and we need to consciously update our beliefs if we want to think clearly about the world. Societies and cultures change and evolve, often faster than our perceptions of them. 'Look for differences within groups and similarities across groups'*. They may lead us to miss opportunities if, for example, we dismiss an entire continent as a business opportunity. We need to categorise things (and people) in order to think about them, but we need to be careful about the generalisations we make. dividing by population to understand rate). It's important to understand the individual lives behind statistics, but it's also important to know those statistics, and to apply the right tools to understand them properly (e.g. We aren't very good at understanding risks, and we get even worse when we're scared. We tend to assume that trends, like birth rates, will continue in a straight line rates, and that's rarely the case in practice.

That means most news is bad, but real life is mostly getting better. The Negativity Instinctīad things tend to happen quickly (war, famine, natural disasters), while good things tend to be slow (year on year drops in child mortality or people living in exteme poverty). For example we create a mental picture of the 'developed world' and the 'developing world', but most people in the world are now much better off than our mental picture suggests. We tend to divide things into groups, and then think in terms of the extremes. By describing them, Rosling hoped to equip us with the tools to upgrade our thinking and overcome our preconceptions. The problem was not a lack of data, but that persistent cognitive biases we all share tend to lead us to an incorrect view of the world, and these instinctive views are suprisingly hard to change. even people who loved my lectures, I sadly realized, weren't really hearing them. This book was born out of Rosling's frustration that, despite the popularity of his talks, people didn't seem to be changing their view of the world. Rosling's message is positive - the world is, for the most part, better than we think it is in terms of healthcare, poverty, education, etc. This book, finished while Hans was dying and published posthumously, is absolutely essential reading for all of us. You can find his Ted talks online, and they're well worth watching. Hans Rosling was a brilliant data storyteller, rightly lauded for his ability to grip an audience with his charismatic, upbeat, use of data about the world.

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