Best of Books

Bill Gates Gifted 4 Million Copies of This Book. Here’s What It’s About

Why facts ≠ truth, and why we need to find them anyway

On June 5, 2018, Bill Gates announced that he’d give away Hans Rosling’s book Factfulness as a gift to every person graduating college in 2018 — making it available to 4 million associate’s, bachelor’s, master’s, and doctor’s degrees cumulatively.

In an age where manifesting, motivated reasoning, and self-deception are in vogue, Rosling makes the case that when we see the world based on facts, we can also make better plans to create the futures we would want to live in. The challenge is, as humans, we’re not wired to process facts by default.

Why Our Instincts Get the Best Of Us

Rosling introduces the book with the news, talking about the horrors of the world — increasing inequality, disasters, corruption, the environmental catastrophes, and such. He calls this “the overdramatic worldview,” describing it as “stressful and misleading.” He likens our instincts and susceptibility to drama to instincts that helped our ancestors survive as small groups of hunters and gatherers. For example, take our cravings for carbohydrates:

Our cravings for sugar and fat make…