Changing the mood: Fighting negativity in a world of unwarranted pessimism

Bill Gates has decided that the world’s mood, or at least the prevailing mood in the West, is overly negative. The Microsoft founder and one of the richest men in the history of humanity has decided to confront this, as he sees it, unwarranted pessimism by giving every US student graduating in 2018 a copy of the late Hans Rosling’s Factfulness.

Published in April, Rosling argues the world is actually in a much better state than we think. “In the past two centuries, life expectancy has more than doubled. Although the world faces huge challenges, we have made tremendous progress,” the Swedish doctor and professor of international health writes.