I have shown that Swedish top students know statistically significantly less about the world than the chimpanzees.

Rosling is underscoring how confidently held “educated” opinions about global development can be worse than random guessing. By comparing Swedish top students to chimpanzees (a stand‑in for chance performance), he dramatizes a key theme of his work: many people—especially in wealthy countries—carry outdated, overly pessimistic mental models of the world (e.g., about poverty, life expectancy, education, and population growth). The provocation is meant to puncture complacency about expertise and to argue for data literacy: without regularly updated facts and a habit of checking assumptions, even high achievers can systematically misread reality.