Factfulness

Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World -- And Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling, 288 pages.

The book starts with Hans Rosling, a professor of public health and medical researcher, gathering a whole lot of data. He surveyed people in all sort of specializations, at all sorts of income levels, in countries around the world; and found that people consistently did much WORSE than they would have guessing randomly when asked about global trends. His questions had to do with things like rates of childhood vaccination, global population trends, and extreme poverty. People worldwide consistently not only overwhelmingly got the questions wrong, but usually thought things were much worse than they were. 

This book is Rosling's attempt to get at the kinds of logical fallacies and thought traps that contribute to all of this incorrect information. Each of the ten chapters is dedicated to a different one of these "instincts" he has identified, such as the "gap instinct" or the "straight-line instinct" (respectively: the tendency to want to separate things into two distinct groups, and the tendency to think rates of change are constant). Each chapters uses both a plethora of examples and data to illustrate the point, then ends with easily actionable bullet points to help reform your own thought patterns. 

I think this is a pretty useful little book! It is both easy to read and fairly actionable, and I appreciate that the author is very excited to share where he gets his information from. This is also not written as an inflammatory book at all, but rather something that's intended to be both comforting and productive. There were times that I found his reasoning to be a little simplistic and occasionally lacking in nuance, but I would still consider this to be a book worth reading, especially with the vitality of media-literacy today.