Book notes: Factfulness by Hans Rosling

I loved this book. I heard about it on Bill Gates' blog. I think this should be some kind of required reading for everyone, everywhere. It does a great job of combining data and simple mental models to illustrate how to think about the world.  America would be a a better place if everyone adopted this thinking style.

As much as I enjoyed the book, one small portion really bugged me. In Chapter 8, he talks about the danger of using simple ideas or ideology to try to explain everything about the world. Every global problem cannot be solved by "free markets" or some such other panacea. This is all well and good, until he starts talking about the U.S. health care system, where he points out with a nifty graph that the U.S. spends almost twice as much per capita as any other country but still has lower life expectancy that many countries.

I'm sure that is true. It was his proposed solution that I found unbelievably at odds with the entire rest of the book. He writes, "The answer is not difficult, by the way: it is the absence of the basic public health insurance that citizens of most other [rich] countries take for granted." WHAT!? Like... where is the data to back this up, in this book that is all about using data to inform your worldview? Maybe it exists somewhere, and for all I know, he might actually be right on this point. But he presents no evidence at all. I felt like this was some sort of unacknowledged test to see if you actually absorbed any of the content he has just presented.

I mean, without doing any research, I can think of several reasons why this might not be accurate (not saying these are actually true, I don't know):

•  U.S. might have a sicker population from things like obesity that a public health system would be challenged to address
•  Life expectancy is not the only measure of the effectiveness of a healthcare system. Maybe on other measures the U.S. does better
• Expensive U.S. medical research could actually be subsidizing health care in other countries 

It just seemed absurd for a Swede to write a whole chapter on how people try to force ideological solutions onto complex problems and then, right in the middle of it, proclaim that socialized medicine would fix U.S. healthcare.