'Factfulness' book review: The world is not really as bad as you think

'Factfulness' offers a booster inoculation against the prevailing irrational pessimism

My grandmother was the Lesothian member of our family,” is one of the most beguiling sentences in Factfulness. Surely Hans Rosling, a Swedish doctor and researcher, did not mean that literally? And indeed he did not have an ancestor from that poor southern African country. What Rosling is drawing our attention to with this thoughtful click-bait is that when his grandmother was born in Sweden in 1891, “Sweden was like Lesotho is today. That’s the country with the shortest life expectancy in the world.” His grandmother hand-washed the laundry for her family of nine. “By the end of her life