46 | New Scientist | 7 September 2019O
LA ROSLING isn’t afraid to point out
your mistakes. He is the president
of Gapminder, the foundation he
set up with his wife Anna Rosling Rönnlund
and his late father Hans Rosling. Gapminder
is dedicated to exposing common
misconceptions about the world and promoting
a fact-based viewpoint. The foundation uses
data visualisations and quizzes to reveal how
little we really know, asking people things
like whether they believe the world is getting
better or worse, and what they think is the
average life expectancy for people globally.
He also advocates a “factfulness” mindset,
one that seeks to overcome our brain’s
inbuilt biases. These arise from the mental
“rules of thumb”, known as heuristics, that
we use to make decisions, and are responsibleFeatures
SOURCE: GAPMINDER.ORGfor our tendency to notice bad events rather
than good ones, and to assume that some
things are destined to happen.
You may have already seen Ola Rosling’s
work via his father’s TED talks. The first, given
in June 2006 on “the best stats you’ve ever
seen”, has now been viewed more than
16 million times. Last year, the trio behind
Gapminder published Factfulness – a book
that identifies the common pitfalls that make
us see the world as a scary place. It became a
global bestseller.You make a compelling case that the world is
better than we believe. Why don’t we notice this?
For some reason, historically, it was beneficial
to worry about everything, to see problems
and plan for disaster. It was the way previous1918
02 05 1 2 5 10 20 50 100 200 500$/dayEXTREME POVERTY‘ We need to realise
that we are ignorant
about our ignorance’
We can only make the world a better place if we
base our views on facts rather than intuitive guesses,
Ola Rosling tells Jacob Aron
The fact of
the matterEconomic information
shows that the world
really has got a lot better
than we might realise.
In 1918, for example,
67.1 per cent of
the world’s population
was living in extreme
poverty (see charts,
below). A hundred years
later, this proportion
had dropped to just
10.6 per cent.