Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think (38 page)

When we have a fact-based worldview, we can see that the world is not as bad as it seems—and we can see what we have to do to keep making it better.

In September 2015, Hans and the two of us decided to write a book together. On February 5, 2016, Hans received a diagnosis of incurable pancreatic cancer. The prognosis was bad. Hans was given two or three months to live or, if the palliative treatments were very successful, perhaps one year.

After the initial horrible shock, Hans thought things through. Life would continue for a while. He would still be able to enjoy time with his wife, Agneta, and his family and friends. But day-to-day, his health would be unpredictable. So within a week he had canceled all his 67 planned lectures for the coming year, as well as all planned TV and radio appearances and film productions. Hans was so sad to do it, but he realized he had no choice. And this dramatic change to his professional life was made bearable by one thing: the book. Following the diagnosis there was pleasure in the sadness as the book turned from being a burden on top of other tasks to being Hans’s intellectual inspiration and joy.

There was so much he wanted to say. Over the next months, in our enthusiasm, the three of us pulled together enough material for a very thick book: about Hans’s life, the work we had done together, and our latest ideas. Until the very end, he remained curious and passionate about the world.

We agreed on the outline for the book and started to write it. We had worked together on challenging projects for many years, and were used to constantly fighting over how best to explain a particular fact or concept. We were quickly humbled to discover how easy the collaboration had been during the years when we had all been well, and how terribly difficult it was to maintain our usual sharp and combative way of working now that Hans was ill. We almost failed.

On the evening of Thursday, February 2, 2017, Hans’s health suddenly deteriorated. An ambulance was called, and into it Hans took printed copies of several chapters of the latest draft, his scribbled notes all over them. Four days later, in the early hours of Tuesday, February 7, Hans died. He had taken comfort over those last days from the drafts, discussing them with Ola from his hospital bed and dictating an email to the publishers, which said that he thought we had at last achieved “exactly the kind of book we have been aiming for.” “Our joint work,” Hans wrote, “is finally being turned into an enjoyable text that will help a global audience to understand the world.”

When we announced Hans’s death, an avalanche of condolences immediately poured in from friends, colleagues, and admirers from all over the world. Tributes to Hans were all over the internet. Our family and friends organized a ceremony at Karolinska Institutet and a funeral at Uppsala Castle, which together beautifully reflected the Hans we knew: brave, innovative, and serious-minded, yet always looking for the circus around the corner; a great friend and colleague and a beloved family member. The circus was there. There was a sword swallower onstage, of course (Hans’s friend, whose X-ray you saw at the beginning of this book) and our son Ted did his own homemade trick with a bandy stick and helmet. (Bandy is a bit like ice hockey but friendlier.) We concluded with Frank Sinatra’s anthem “My Way
.
” Not just because Hans always did it His Way, but because of a lucky accident of a few years earlier. Hans didn’t care much about music and he always insisted he was totally tone deaf, but his youngest son, Magnus, had once heard him sing. Hans had accidentally called Magnus from his pocket and, completely unaware, left him a four-minute voice message. This recorded Hans driving through traffic while singing loudly and lustily to Frank Sinatra’s defiant anthem. This was just so Hans. You have seen his list of global risks but it couldn’t stop him from singing on his way to work. Two thoughts at the same time: concerned and full of joy.

We had worked with Hans for 18 years. We had written his scripts and directed his TED talks, and argued with him for hours (sometimes months) about every detail of them. We had heard all his stories many times and had them recorded in many forms.

Working on the book had been painful in the last months of Hans’s life but was strangely comforting in the months immediately after his death. As we completed this precious task, Hans’s voice was always in our heads, and we often felt that he was not gone but still in the room beside us. Finishing the book felt like the best way to keep him with us and to honor his memory.

Hans would have loved promoting this book, and he would have done it brilliantly, but he knew from the moment of his diagnosis that that was not going to be possible. Instead, it falls to us to continue his mission and ours. Hans’s dream of a fact-based worldview lives on in us and, we hope now, in you too.

Anna Rosling R
ö
nnlund and Ola Rosling

Stockholm, 2018

Most of what I understand about the world I learned not from studying data or sitting in front of a computer reading research papers—though I have done a lot of that too—but from spending time with, and discussing the world with, other people. I have had the privilege of traveling, studying, and working all over the world, with people from every continent, every major world religion, and, most importantly, at all income levels. I have learned a lot from the CEOs of international businesses and from my PhD students in Stockholm. I have learned even more from women living in extreme poverty in Africa; from Catholic nuns working in the most remote villages; from medical students in Bangalore and academics from Nigeria, Tanzania, Vietnam, Iran, and Pakistan; and from the thought leaders of countries on all income levels, from Eduardo Mondlane to Melinda Gates. I want to thank all of you for sharing your knowledge with me, for making my life so rich and wonderful, and for showing me a world completely different from the one I learned about in school.

Understanding the world is one thing. Turning that understanding into a book is another. As always, it is the team behind the scenes who make it possible. Thank you to each one of the dedicated and creative members of staff at Gapminder who built the resources that I used in all my lectures.

Thank you to our literary agent, Max Brockman, for great advice and support, and to our editors, Drummond Moir at Hodder in the United Kingdom and Will Schwalbe at Macmillan in the United States, for believing in the book, for their kind and calm guidance through the process, and for their wise counsel on how to improve the book. Thanks too to Harald Hultqvist for telling us we had to get an international agent, and to Richard Herold, our editor in Sweden, for being an excellent adviser through the early process and throughout. Thanks to Bill Warhop, the copy editor, and Bryn Clark, for their input. If you found this book readable, it is thanks to Deborah Crewe. She was brave to take on three authors with way too much material. She listened hard to what we wanted, and then worked patiently and with great skill, speed, and humor, turning our eccentric Swenglish into what you have just read. Even more important, she was able to absorb our thousands of fact snippets, anecdotes, and rules of thumb, and help us to mold them into one coherent epic. We are so grateful to our new dear friend.

Special thank-yous to Max, Ted, and Ebba for letting me spend so many weekends and evenings with your parents, Anna and Ola. I hope that when you read this book and see the work we have been doing you will forgive me a little. And thank you for your own contributions: to Max (12), who spent hours discussing research with me in my office and editing hundreds of my recorded transcripts; to Ted (10), who took photos for Dollar Street, tested our fact questions on his classmates, and went to New York to receive the UN Population Award on my behalf; and to Ebba (8), who came up with clever ideas on how to improve the material and design the artwork you see throughout the book.

There is a phrase in Swedish, “st
å
ut.” It means putting up with, bearing with, enduring, hanging in there. I hope my family, friends, and colleagues know how grateful I am that they have “st
å
tt ut” with me so much over the years. I realize that the way I work—the way I am—means I have often been absent or, if not absent, then rushing in and out. I know that even when I have been present I have often been distracted and irritating. I can be a frustrating person when I am working, which is almost all the time I am awake. So my thanks go to everyone I have the honor to call a friend and colleague. It is hard to pick out one friend and colleague above all others but I must particularly thank Hans Wigzell, who bravely supported Gapminder from the very beginning and who was with me until the last day, tirelessly trying to figure out ways to prolong my life.

Above all, for their endless patience and love, my deep and sincere thanks go to my teenage love, wife, and companion throughout my life, Agneta; to my beloved children, Anna, Ola, and Magnus, and their spouses; and to my grandchildren, Doris, Stig, Lars, Max, Ted, Ebba, Tiki, and Mino, who every day give me hope for the future.

J
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n and his team, World Health Organization, World We Want Foundation, Danzhen You, Guohua Zheng, and Zhang Zhongxing.