For comparison, $64 a day translates into slightly less than the $26,200 poverty level for a family of four as currently defined in the United States. This permits them (us) to attain at least a high-school education, to travel, buy a car, and eat out at least once a month. Level 4 defines the world’s richest one billion, with daily incomes upwards of $64.Those who live at this level “can install a cold-water tap” as well as electricity for lighting and a refrigerator. The two billion people in Level 3 earn anywhere from $8 to $64 per day.At this level, people can buy food they don’t grow themselves, a gas stove, and mattresses to sleep on. Level 2 encompasses the roughly three billion people whose daily income falls into the range of $2 to $8.As Rosling notes, “Low-income countries are much more developed than most people think. At Level 1, some 800 million people still subsist in extreme poverty, earning less than $2 a day.
In fact, if you group together the world’s people into cohorts by meaningful income levels-an approach Rosling apparently persuaded the World Bank to pursue-you find there are four that make sense: The world is by no means sharply divided into rich and poor, as so many of us seem to believe. But the gist of the argument is that the yawning gap between the world’s have and have-nots is a thing of the past.įactfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World-and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling, with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund (2018) 341 pages (5 out of 5) You can find them on the Roslings’ website,. They tell the story of human betterment far more effectively than words can do. “Not on every single measure every single year, but as a rule.” In his lectures, and in this book, he dramatizes the trend through novel graphics that illustrate the startling decrease in the number of people living in extreme poverty and the corresponding shift upward in the income scale of billions more. “Step-by-step, year-by-year, the world is improving,” he writes. Rosling’s central thesis is that the conditions of human life have gotten steadily, and in fact, rapidly better over the past half century-and there’s no disputing the point. Brilliant graphics to tell an unfamiliar story And in the process he renders a picture of the world today that is more hopeful than we’re likely to have had in mind. In Factfulness, Rosling reminds us that we’re all at the mercy of psychological forces we’re loath to recognize. The result was this compact and entertaining little book that seeks to explain to us all how badly we understand the state of the human project-and why we don’t know better. In the closing months of his life, as pancreatic cancer worked its painful way through his system, the legendary lecturer Hans Rosling (1948-2017) labored with his son and daughter-in-law to compile the lessons he had spent decades teaching about the state of the world.
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