Hans Rosling

Worked as a physician in rural Mozambique in the early eighties, where he identified an outbreak of a paralytic disease later traced to improperly processed cassava.

Factfulness is built on a quiz he gave to audiences for years, on child mortality, girls' education, vaccination rates, and the finding that the public consistently scored worse than chance. Chimpanzees picking at random beat Davos.

He identified ten instincts that produce the error, the gap instinct, the negativity instinct, the fear instinct, and argued the world is neither fine nor doomed but improving unevenly. He finished the book while dying of pancreatic cancer in 2017; his son and daughter-in-law completed it.