Hans Rosling opens by presenting extensive survey data demonstrating that most people, including highly educated professionals, hold a systematically more negative and inaccurate view of global trends than actual data supports.

Why this systematic inaccuracy matters:

• Rosling's surveys, administered to diverse professional and educated audiences, consistently show performance worse than random chance on basic questions about global health, poverty, and development trends
• This isn't simply due to lack of information, but reflects systematic cognitive biases that distort how people process and interpret global data
• This opening establishes the book's central empirical finding and its core project of both documenting genuine global progress and explaining why this progress is so systematically underestimated

This opening establishes the book's foundational surprising finding, motivating its subsequent examination of both actual global data and the specific cognitive instincts producing this systematic misperception.