AUTHOR Hans Rosling says that contrary to what many of us believe (and will, alas, continue to believe), “the majority of people live neither in low-income countries nor in high-income countries, but in middle-income countries.”
Hans Rosling
That category — middle-income — is “where 75 percent of humanity lives, right there where the gap is supposed to be. Or, to put it another way, there is no gap,” Rosling wrote in his I-can’t-believe-you-still-haven’t read-it book, “Factfulness.”
What we will always see, read and/or hear about are never-ending bad news about the truly miserable lives of impoverished people all around the world. Why?
According to Rosling, we usually pay more attention to information that fits our dramatic instincts while ignoring information that does not. “The media can’t waste time on stories that won’t pass our attention filters. Here are a couple of headlines that won’t get past a newspaper editor, because they are unlikely to get past our own filters: ‘MALARIA CONTINUES TO GRADUALLY DECLINE.’ ‘METEOROLOGISTS CORRECTLY PREDICTED YESTERDAY THAT THERE WOULD BE MILD WEATHER IN LONDON TODAY.’ Here are some topics that easily get through our filters: earthquakes, war, refugees, disease, fire, floods, shark attacks, terror attacks. These unusual events are more newsworthy than everyday ones. And the unusual stories we are constantly shown by the media paint pictures in our heads. If we are not extremely careful, we come to believe that the unusual is usual: that this is what the world looks like.”
Rosling said it is unwise (because inaccurate) to divide countries into two groups (rich and poor). “It doesn’t help us to understand the world in a practical way. It doesn’t help businesses find opportunities, and it doesn’t help aid money to find the poorest people.”
Instead of dividing the world into two groups, Rosling divided it into four income levels:
• Level 1 is made up of people who earn less than $2 a day and live in extreme poverty. There are about 1 billion of them.
• At Level 2, people earn between $2 and $8 a day. Almost half or about 3 billion of the world’s population live at this income level.
• Level 3 is made up of about 2 billion people who live on between $8 and $32 per day.
• The richest billion people on earth live at Level 4, where their income is more than $32 a day.
Rosling said the challenge for people who have always known a high level of income is to be aware of the realities of income levels and not misunderstand them. Throughout human history, many revolutionaries, reformists, concerned citizens and other self-appointed saviors of the human race came from the middle to upper socio-economic classes. It should not be surprising that a lot of them were (still are) for “once-and-for-all,” “attack-the-root-causes” “solutions” (final ones included).
As Rosling has noted, human history started with everyone on Level 1. “For more than 100,000 years nobody made it up the levels and most children didn’t survive to become parents. Just 200 years ago, 85 percent of the world population was still on Level 1, in extreme poverty. Today the vast majority of people are spread out in the middle, across Levels 2 and 3, with the same range of standards of living as people had in Western Europe and North America in the 1950s. And this has been the case for many years.”
But Rosling also concedes that the misconception of a gap between the rich and the poor is “so hard to change.” Human beings, he added, “have a strong dramatic instinct toward binary thinking, a basic urge to divide things into two distinct groups, with nothing but an empty gap in between. We love to dichotomize. Good versus bad. Heroes versus villains. My country versus the rest. Dividing the world into two distinct sides is simple and intuitive, and also dramatic because it implies conflict, and we do it without thinking, all the time.”
Journalists know this, Rosling said. “They set up their narratives as conflicts between two opposing people, views, or groups. They prefer stories of extreme poverty and billionaires to stories about the vast majority of people slowly dragging themselves toward better lives. Journalists are storytellers. So are people who produce documentaries and movies. Documentaries pit the fragile individual against the big, evil corporation. Blockbuster movies usually feature good fighting evil.”
A Swedish medical doctor, Rosling advised the good folks around the world who live on Level 4, that the “thing known as poverty in your country is different from ‘extreme poverty.’ It’s ‘relative poverty.’ In the United States, for example, people are classified as below the poverty line even if they live on Level 3. So the struggles people go through on Levels 1, 2, and 3 will most likely be completely unfamiliar to you. And they are not described in any helpful way in the mass media you consume. Your most important challenge in developing a fact-based worldview is to realize that most of your firsthand experiences are from Level 4; and that your secondhand experiences are filtered through the mass media, which loves nonrepresentative extraordinary events and shuns normality. When you live on Level 4, everyone on Levels 3, 2, and 1 can look equally poor, and the word ‘poor’ can lose any specific meaning.”
To be continued
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