Factfulness

This book is very frustrating at times but overall the message is great and made me think and that's all I can ask for I suppose.

My main complaints are..

I almost dropped it in the first half because of the constant baffling preconceived (and racist) notions he keeps mentioning european/american people particularly his students have. For a while it seemed very aimed at a western audience in that regard but I'm glad a stuck with it. Though it really opened my eyes on how ignorant the average western person is about “non-western” countries. Ironically the chapters that were meant to make the (western) reader think “oh things aren't so bad in the world over!” made me despair for the western world lol anyway...

Second thing is a lot of the “things are better than you think!” talk is..semantics. For example he says most of the word is middle class and a small part of the population is actually extremely poor! Sounds great until you read his definition of middle class which sounds like hell lol. Or the talk about how certain things like vaccination rates or percentage of girls getting an education for example are getting higher. Well duh, they weren't about to go lower?

This all makes it sound very negative and yet I give it 4 stars. I agreed with the bulk of what he said and the core message of fact checking and not falling into what he calls a dramatic word view. We're getting an overload of skewed info everyday and it's important to actually sit down and cross check before falling into hopelessness. And then fall into it anyway probably because the world really is kinda fucked. Just a bit less so thank you might think.