I’m still working through the Factfulness book on the commute, and it’s exciting reading. My expectations of how humanity is doing is completely different to what the actual data shows! The great news is that we’re actually doing far better than we think.
The authors publish a website called Gapminder.org, on which they illustrate their points via a collection of lovely interactive graphs.
Take this one for example, showing the spread of global household incomes across a scale, those in extreme poverty on the left through to the wealthiest on the right. I’ve moved it back to 1970, the year of my birth, to give an example of the clear split between the rich and poor and in line with our typical views of “how things are”.
https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$state$time$value=1970;;&chart-type=mountain
Now drag the slider bar beneath the graph to move the date forward to the present day and notice how it changes :-
- Where the “bulge” (ie majority of humans) moves along the line and how the gap between rich and poor changes this century – what does that mean about current lifestyle for the majority of humans?
- How much the bulge grows over time – how much safer has the World become, given that the number of babies per household drop dramatically as income and education grows?
- Which coloured segment (continent) grows the most over time – where will the majority of people be from in the future, and what will that do for shifting the balance of power?
Of course this doesn’t mean too many people are living in hellish conditions or dying unnecessarily, that would be naive and foolish. But graphs like this – and many others you can view on the site – do show how dramatically and quickly things have improved for us, not by fluke or accident but by hard work and co-operation between nations around the World.
bodecott.blog 