It was a head to head race. Who would win – the chimpanzees or me. After I crossed the finish line, I made it. I beat the chimpanzees, but I knew there was still no reason for feeling victorious.
I was blown away by my lack of some basic knowledge about human socio-economics. I just started to read Hans Roslings' excellent book "Factfulness". In the first chapter, he quizzes you about some basic statistics about human socio-economic development. I failed that test miserably (only 7 out of 13 correct answers).
One of the visual examples he gave was that if you threw three bananas (one per answer, since all questions in the quiz had three answers) at some chimpanzees, they would pick on average 33,3% of the right answers.
I felt a little better once he showed me, that I was fairing better than those chimpanzees (they would only pick 3-4 correct answers), and the average person only gets 2 out of 13. But why do most of us fail in this test? That’s what made me speechless.
If you want to do this test yourself (no cheating below), go to the online quiz.
Child Mortality Rate in Developing Countries
Here is just one example (BTW - all charts are from Hans Roslings’ excellent website gapminder.com.
Most people believe that there is a gap between rich/developed and poor/developing countries. This gap not only reflects in income but also in the quality of life, health, number of children per household, and child mortality.
Take a look at this chart.
It shows that women in developing countries have more children than those in developed countries and have a higher child mortality rate. Isn't that what most of us think about developing countries.
This chart was accurate – in 1965! It represents the data from 55 years ago.
Now take a look at the current chart from 2019.
As you can see the vast majority of countries have on average moved from 5-8 children to 2-3 children. And child mortality has moved from 10-50% (in developing countries) to 0.02 to 5% for most countries.
If you want to play with this data you can go to their website at gapminder.com. Here is the 1965 and the 2019 chart. There you have a nice slider to see the interactive development during time.
Do you see the dramatic change that happened in the last 55 years? The view most of us have of the world today corresponds to the reality of 1965.
The Income Continuum
Low-income countries are much more developed than is generally assumed. The idea of a divided world in which the majority lives in need and misery is an illusion.
To take a look for yourself, check out another great project called Dollar Street.
There you can see how people worldwide live ranging from 27$ per month up to 19.671$ per month.
Yes, there is poverty in the world, and we still need to work on that – but the reality isn't that black and white anymore.
4 Income Levels Therefore, the world bank decided to drop the words "Developed countries" and "Developing countries". Instead, they use four income groups to define the differences between countries. These four income levels are ranging from Level 1 (1$/day) to Level 4 (>32$/day).
This is what the distribution looks like today.
You can check out this chart on gapminder.com.
- Taking the middle and high-income countries together, you get 91 percent of humanity, most of whom have integrated into the world market and made great strides to a decent life.
- 75 percent of the world's population live in middle-income countries.
- Only 9 percentof the world population lives in low-income countries and could be considered poor.
How our view of the world fails us.
The question that came to mine (and Hans) attention was: How is it that no one knows about this stuff? Why is our world view so out of touch with reality?
Our over-dramatized world view is so difficult to overcome because it is directly related to the way our brain works. We prefer clear-cut differences and Black & White thinking to thinking in continuums and shades of grey. Overcoming this allows us not only to become a happier human being but also more effectively use our resources for helping others climb the socio-ecological ladder.
Yes, there is still a lot to do - there are still 9% of the world living in poverty, there is still the problem of sexual and racial inequality, there is climate change - all big topics, all worth fighting for.
But once in a while it is good to see, that we as humanity have made progress in so many areas. So we shouldn’t stop there and we shouldn’t believe in populists doom and gloom prophecies. If those charts show us one thing it is that progress is coming - maybe sometimes to slow - but those who would like to turn back the clock are on the loosing side of evolution.
So, the first step is getting knowledge about the real state of the world.
An excellent start is the site gapminder.org by Hans Rosling.
Unfortunately, Hans died in 2017, but his son and his daughter-in-law make sure that his legacy, the Gapminder foundation, is still improving people's awareness, leading them to a life of "Factfulness ".
Photo: Gito Nirboyo for Dollar Street (Free to use under CC BY 4.0)
