The author of one of Bill Gates' favorite books says the world isn’t as apocalyptic as you might think — here are five of his top reasons why

hans rosling factfulness

Bill Gates' favorite Swedish doctor and statistician, Hans Rosling, died of pancreatic cancer last year at the age of 68. Rosling's new book, published posthumously, is now here to tell you life on Earth isn't as bad as it might seem.

His new book, 'Factfulness,' was published Tuesday with the help of his son and daughter-in-law, who finished up the final chapters of the book.

The non-fiction pick is already on Bill Gates' unofficial list of must-reads of 2018. Gates praised the title as “One of the most important books I’ve ever read ― an indispensable guide to thinking clearly about the world.”

Like any good statistician, Rosling uses the tools of his trade (namely, graphs, charts and lots of questionnaires) to argue we're doing too much feeling and not enough thinking when it comes to assessing the world.

He says our highly-emotional take is making us see the world in inaccurate and dire ways that don't reflect all the progress that's been made by modern improvements like vaccines, family planning, and widespread income and education gains for some of the world's poorest people. His global surveys show that we tend to see the world in fatalistic ways, overestimating how many people are in poverty, assuming violent crime rates are skyrocketing, and thinking that many more people are dying in natural disasters than is actually the case.

Rosling thinks there's one simple reason this is true: we're operating under perspective-distorting, emotion-fueled "instincts" about how the world works, causing us to pretty much always assume the worst.

His goal is to change the way we see the world, by arming us with what he calls a "set of simple thinking tools."

Take a look at a few of the reasons that the Roslings say we're not actually barreling towards a terrible, horrible, apocalyptic future:

We've already reached peak baby-making levels, and the health of the world is on the up-and-up.

Rosling says what he calls our "negativity instinct" often makes us notice more of the bad than the good in the world.

But when it comes to procreating, he says we're doing OK. The United Nations estimates that the number of children in the world between the ages of zero and 15 will be exactly the same in 2100 as it is today: two billion. It's a promising sign that birth rates around the world are stabilizing, after centuries of exponential growth.

But just because we'll be popping out fewer (and likely also healthier) kids in the future doesn't mean there will be fewer mouths to feed.

There will be billions more adults in the world between the ages of 16 and 74 by 2100, and feeding them all could still be a challenge. Even though we technically have enough food to feed the world, more than 815 million go to bed hungry and under-nourished every night, according to the UN.

Globally, we're living a lot longer than most people assume.

Average global life expectancy is around 70 years (though it's a bit higher for women and a bit lower for men).

That number is a lot better than what most people think, but it's important to remember the longevity numbers aren't universal.

Here in the US, where we spend more that double on health care than any other rich country per capita, we don't do nearly as well as most of them. At least 30 other countries around the world outlive Americans, and life expectancy in the US for both men and women is just shy of 80 years.

And there are new signs that US life expectancy is getting worse. Death rates for white working-class men between the ages of 25 and 64 are on the rise in the US, even as more life-saving treatments become available. Scientists think the big killers here could be more deadly overdoses, suicides and liver problems from drinking alcohol.

Rosling says there's another critically flawed fallacy at work here in the US health care system: the "single perspective instinct," or the idea that problems tend to stem from one single root cause and can likewise be solved with a single solution. He argues that Americans are ignoring key preventative measures while running up expensive and unnecessary hospital bills.