Me Thinks

A friend recommended this book and I thought it was very interesting.  I liked it! Now you have to realize that this book was written before COVID and in the past few months there have been numerous challenges world-wide, but Mr. Rosling's message still resonates.  He paints a positive picture of our standard of living and how the world has improved in numerous areas. I share a few excerpts:

The vast majority of the world's population lives somewhere in the middle of the income scale.  Perhaps they are not what we think of as middle class, but they are not living in extreme poverty.  Their girls go to school, their children get vaccinated, they live in two-child families, and they want to go abroad on holiday, not as refugees.  Step-by-step, year-by-year, the world is improving.  Not on every single measure every single year, but as a rule.  Though the world faces huge challenges, we have made tremendous progress.  This is the fact-based worldview (pg. 13).

In 1800, roughly 85 percent of humanity lived in extreme poverty.  All over the world, people simply did not have enough food.  Most people went to bed hungry several times a year.  Until 1966, extreme poverty was the rule, not the exception (pg. 52).

It is not doctors and hospital beds that save children's lives.  Beds and doctors are easy to count and politicians love to inaugurate buildings.  But almost all the increased child survival is achieved through preventive measures outside hospitals by local nurses, midwives, and well-educated parents.  Especially mothers; the data shows that half the increase in child survival in the world happens because the mothers can read and write.  More children now survive because they don't get ill in the first place (pg. 129).

People are consistently more negative than the data says they should be.

Forming your worldview by relying on the media would be like forming your view about me by looking only at a picture of my foot.  Sure, my foot is part of me, but it's a pretty ugly part.  I have better parts (pg. 185).

Being humble means being aware of how difficult your instincts can make it to get the facts right. It means being realistic about the extent of your knowledge.  It means being happy to say "I don't know." It also means, when you do have an opinion, being prepared to change it when you discover new facts.  It is quite relaxing being humble, because it means you can stop feeling pressured to have a view about everything, and stop feeling you  must be ready to defend your views all the time (pg. 249).