FACTFULNESS;The book to read.

What a year that has been. I am one book to hitting my target of 52 books. Growing up, I loved Tv upto until when I cleared High school and all over sudden my love for Tv has been replaced by books and generally reading. That to a greater extent frees up time for my reading and again takes me to my favourite book that I've read this year, that's Factfulness. While reading my come generally with ease, I have to admit it a culture I've had to develop and I've tried my best to have people around me read books. Before that, here are the 1st and 2rd reviews I have done.

I came across this book from Bill gates book club where I have borrowed many other books to read since last year. This book has been recommended by many other people including Barrack Obama. 

Factfulness is a book that focuses on a day to day living and how we see the world, what influences our perspective towards it and what we can do to realise that the world is actually getting better.

Hans classifies 10 instincts and amongst that I'll highlight three.

1. Gap instinct. When we're presented with huge numbers, more often than not, we are presented with the extreme numbers. The wealthiest vs the poorest, but what really is happening between the two extremes is that people are living better in the middle than before. When we look from high point above, we tend to see everything else as very tiny and any progress my pass unrecognized. There's probably no gap between the extremes.

2. Straight line instinct. If asked what the estimated population of the world by year 2100 what comes into peoples minds is volumes and volumes of people going to hundreds of billions but thats incorrect. the population is estimated to grow by a small margin if not remain the same. This is explained well taking into mind what really constitutes the population in terms of gender and the age of the said gender. In the past, the population has grown significantly and we tend to assume a straight line that the scenario at hand will continue on the same trajectory, which is incorrect. The way to correct this ks to imagine the growth of a child, it would be unimaginable to think that a child would grow at the same rate until they're 80 years. Many trends do not follow a straight line but are s-bend, slides, humps or doubling. 

3. Fear instinct - We tend to fear things that are frightening but not dangerous where as we shoukd pay attention to what is dangerous and not frightening. Case scenario, we may focus on fear of terrorists rather than something like Malaria that claims more lives than terrorist. While Malaria is dangerous, terrorism is frightening but occurrence of the later is very minimal. 

Lastly, be wary of media as they tend to broadcast a lot of negative information while failing to highlight that a lot of good things happening are on the increase, namely women’s rights, New music, science, volume of harvests, literacy levels, democracy, child cancer survival, girls in school , electricity coverage, mobile phones connectivity, immunization and even the internet. A lot of bad things are in the decline too, such as slavery, oil spills, have infections, children deaths, battle deaths, child Labour, plane crash deaths, small pox, nuclear arms, ozone depletion(I was amazed) and even hunger is on decline. 

Reading through this books reminds me of Andrew Carnegie autobiography where he states that we often times remark that comparing today and then, the good old days are not indeed good, we're living at a better time than never.