After more than fifty years of friendship and marriage, three children and eight grandchildren, Hans left me to a severe silence. Through this book his voice can be heard again.
Hans started writing about his life several years ago. He wanted to use his own family experience to tell the story of social development: to point out the similarities between the lives of people from his grandparents’ generation, born in Sweden over one hundred years ago, and the lives of people in many countries today, far away from modern-day Sweden both in kilometers and in their living conditions. He wanted to share the stories that had changed or strengthened his vision of what was important in life: of what has to be changed in the world to give us all a sustainable future.
Hans always emphasized that he wasn’t being altruistic when he emphasized the need for equality to avoid conflict and war, but selfish. He wanted a world without war for himself, his family and everyone else. Neither was he an optimist, because he never thought the changes he was talking about would be easy to achieve. He called himself a “possibilist” and always strived to convince his audience that it was possible to make the world a place where everyone had a fair chance of living a life on reasonable terms.
Cross-country running was a favorite sport, and Hans always liked to use a map to know where he was and a compass to find the way. This illustrates his way of analyzing any situation. You can find the right direction and reach your goal only if you know where you are now and how things are around you. The importance of developing critical thinking habits to understand global development is covered in greater depth in the book Hans wrote with our son Ola Rosling and daughter-in-law Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Factfulness.
This book, How I Learned to Understand the World, tells Hans’s own story, from childhood through to his adult life and career. It was first published in Swedish the year Hans passed away. In this edition, some of the stories are left out, as we thought these would only be interesting in the Swedish context or because they had already been told in Factfulness. I am very pleased that English-language readers will be able to read Hans’s memoir in this edited form.
Hans’s legacy is maintained and developed by the Gapminder Foundation and, in various ways, by a number of universities both in Sweden and elsewhere. Through the Gapminder Foundation, Ola and Anna are continuing their creative work of promoting a fact-based worldview that is easy to understand. At this time, with the Covid-19 pandemic threatening to increase poverty and hunger in many low-income countries, Hans would have been more committed than ever to this work. I am satisfied to know that his voice is still being heard, and that so many people have learned the lessons he was trying to teach and taken his experience to heart.
Hans would have loved to test your knowledge.
The importance of a fact-based understanding of the world is more pressing than ever.
Agneta Rosling
Uppsala, April 2020