On the Bookshelf: Factfulness by Hans Rosling
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Vaccine Update for Healthcare ProvidersPublished on
Vaccine Update for Healthcare ProvidersHow many of the world’s 1-year-old children today have been vaccinated against some disease?
If you read this month’s “News and Views” article, you are likely to get this answer right (C. 80 percent). But, only 17 percent of U.S. residents asked this question got it right, and residents of many other countries did no better in informal surveys conducted by the author. The highest number of correct answers was given in Sweden and, even there, only 21 percent answered correctly.
This is one of 13 questions presented at the beginning of the book, Factfulness. Hans Rosling, with assistance from his son and daughter-in-law, Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund, points out that most people get questions related to the state of life around the world wrong. In fact, chimpanzees more often choose the correct answers by chance alone than do people from around the world.
Once this point is made, Rosling goes on to describe 10 instincts that lead people to be so consistently wrong. Each instinct is described with examples in a dedicated chapter of the book
Rosling suggests that rather than using a two-factor system to describe the world’s population, such as developed and developing, we should look at the world’s population as a four-level system. People living on less than $2 per day are considered to be in level one and those living on more than $32 per day are in level four. Through measures such as mode of transportation, drinking water, cooking methods, and others, Rosling shows how those living on levels two through four is where most people in the world reside. Throughout the book, he returns to the importance of this more descript way of analyzing quality of life and how the populations of some countries have moved to higher levels over time.
For anyone interested in public health or a better understanding of the world’s health and living conditions, this book is required reading.
Contributed by: Charlotte A. Moser, MS
Categories: Vaccine Update November 2018, On the Bookshelf
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