Rating: 8.4/10.
This book was written by Hans Rosling (the same guy that made The Joy of Stats documentary) just before he died in 2017. [redacted] recommended it to me. It uses stats to show that despite what the media portrays, and despite popular conception, the world is not such a bad place. Extreme poverty is on the decline, children are being vaccinated, women are going to school.
At the beginning of the book, he gives a quiz of 13 questions. Most people score terribly, worse than random chance, by consistently guessing that the world is worse than it actually is. Without looking at stats, it’s easy to be systematically mislead and fall into a bunch of fallacies like not considering magnitude of effects, generalizing your experience to others, or acting based on fear. Maybe because of my stats background, a lot of what he says is quite obvious to me. Also I scored 9 on the quiz, which is higher than pretty much everyone. It confirmed some stuff that I already knew, but still it had good insights on poverty and developing nations.
A big takeaway for me is to be thankful of what we have, seeing the difference of lives in levels 1-3. Canada is a level 4 country (where people spend more than $32 dollars a day) yet people make fun of me for making 20k/year “poverty” grad school wages. Grad students in Canada should be thankful that we have electricity, running water, can eat out at restaurants, and not sad that we can’t afford luxury cars and condos.
