Why we wrote Factfulness

Hi, my name is Ola Rosling.

and I'm Anna Rosling Rönnlund.

We founded the Gapminder Foundation

together with Hans Rosling,

Ola's father.

Together, the three of us have written a book:

Factfulness.

And it's actually gonna be available

in 24 languages pretty soon.

Unfortunately, one year ago

my father passed away

in the middle of writing the book together with us.

And since then

the two of us have spent night and day

finalising the book.

So we are very, very happy

that finally its ready.

And we are now gonna show you a clip

that we recorded two years ago

together with Hans.

It explains how we ended up deciding

to write this book.

It all started in this very living room.

17 years ago.

And at the dinner I couldn't resist

showing you my first version of this bubble graph

where each bubble is a country,

down here income,

here health, and color was different continents

And I remember that you sort of liked it.

Yeah, I did and we actually brought it home and

do you remember, we put it on our wall at home.

And the fun thing was that our friends also started liking it

So they started talking about the bubbles and so on and we....

I think that was the starting point

when we realised that we really wanted to work further on the project.

So you were making an animated version of it,

and you started using the animated version on your lectures.

And it seemed quite popular.

And then we attracted so much data,

actually, so we realised, this won't work.

We need to somehow scale it up.

We were very lucky.

At that first TED talk in 2006.

We prepared jointly, my talk.

And then, when I had finished the talk,

two persons came rushing up on the stage.

First was Al Gore.

And the second was a little shorter.

It was Larry Page. The co-founder of Google.

And Larry Page looked at me, you know,

the old professor, then he said:

“Who wrote the code?”

He understood directly that this old man

hadn't done the code.

And I had to answer:

“Well, its my son, his wife and their team of programmers.”

“They are invited to come to Google and present it.”

Our hope was that Google would kind of steal the idea.

Instead they wanted us to work at Google,

to develop what later became Google Public Data.

Where users across the World can search data

and we liberated, together with the World Bank,

public data, and also from Eurostat, and others.

So, that in the search results,

you can find the latest statistics from the official source.

So that's a great achievement

to democratise access to data.

Unfortunately very few people search for data

and if you find the data, its often fragmented

You don't get the big worldview

from fragments in a Google result.

We went back to Gapminder

where we had left Hans some years earlier,

to actually develop teaching materials.

And for us to prioritise

we realised we should go out and just measure.

But what was the sad news, or shocking even,

was that people knew barely nothing, right?

The ignorance was so massive.

And you did public surveys,

with survey companies, through the internet.

and with those results, I said

“But the professional groups I lecture to now...”

you know, "...in United Nations, in universities and corporate sector...”

“They must know this.”

Then we got these answering devices.

where you can put questions and answers.

And to our surprise, we found the same lack of knowledge

of major demographic change, health change, economic change in the world.

And that's when we realised we have to write a book,

where we put all these things together.

And this is the book called Factfulness,

that we have done together.

This clip was recorded two years ago.

And since then, the Gapminder foundation has tested the general public

in 14 countries,

with fact-questions about the state of the World.

The results were absolutely terrible!

Even worse than we expected.

Among 12,000 people,

The vast majority got almost all the questions wrong,

as you will see in the book.

It seems like people are suffering from

an overdramatic worldview.

They think the world is in much worse shape

than it actually is.

And this leads to terrible decisions

and tons of unnecessary stress.

To solve this problem though,

we needed to understand how is it even possible

that so many people

are getting so many things so wrong?

Well, fortunately we found clear patterns

behind the common misconceptions.

And together with Hans,

we identified the 10 dramatic instincts

that make people misinterpret the World

again and again

and leading to an over dramatic world view.

It all sounds bad, but actually,

Our book

Actually, our book is truly comforting

because it gives you concrete rules of thumb

to control your dramatic instincts.

And it actually teaches you

the new relaxing thinking habit

which we call Factfulness.

And Hans´s stories are really fun.