12 Books to Expand Your Worldview as a Data Professional

In this article, we examine a dozen books that will help you think about data in different ways. I believe it is so important for all of us who work in this field to be able to flexibly evaluate data across distinct modalities and use it to create a robust and coherent narrative.

Therefore, this list of books spans topics ranging from geopolitics to social science, from technofuturism to behavioral psychology, and from data visualization to artificial intelligence. Let’s get started!

1. Factfulness

• Authors: Hans Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund, and Ola Rosling
• Time to read: 5 hrs 52 mins (352 pages)
• Rating: 4.6/5 (13,768 total ratings)

Summary:

This book discusses how the majority of people in wealthy countries hold a skewed and outdated worldview. In general, people tend to think things are worse than they really are. This widely-held opinion seems to be the result of a lack of knowledge, a poor understanding of statistics, and the 24-hour news cycle.

Factfulness drills down into each of these issues in order to empower readers with a more fact-based worldview. The authors categorize the top ten biases in how we evaluate the state of the world. They offer education on how to recognize and prevent these misconceptions. Moreover, they highlight how good news is routinely underreported and how this contributes to an inaccurate understanding of other people.

The book criticizes the notion that the world can be bifurcated into “developed” and “developing.” In fact, today nearly all countries could be considered “developed” relative to their technological status when this categorization was initially proposed.

The authors put forward an updated model based on income per person adjusted for price differences:

• Level 1: less than $2 a day
• Level 2: $2–$8 a day
• Level 3: $8–$32 a day
• Level 4: $32+ a day