Ep.50 - How the Rest of the World Lives (3 Minute Read)
Read Time: 3 Minutes.
Have you ever wondered how the rest of the world really lives? I know I have. My own experience is largely limited to China, the United States, and six months in Germany. I am deeply curious about how the rest of the world lives.
You may have traveled a lot, but I would not considering visiting Rome for a week as having deep knowledge or understanding of how the locals live. Even when you travel around the world, you don't really live the life of a local.
Thanks to Anna Rosling Rönnlund, however, now there is a new way to visualize how people actually live with data from Dollar Street.
WHAT IS DOLLAR STREET?
Dollar Street is a research website that visualizes how different families on a spectrum of incomes live all over the world. It is done with real data from 260+ households around the world.
The basic concept is simple. Imagine a world of people living on the same street, with the poorest households on the left, the richest to the right, and everyone else in the middle. Hence, the name Dollar Street.
THE WORLD IS MORE SIMILAR THAN YOU THINK
If you go on this website yourself , you will soon realize, regardless of culture and nationality, people on similar range of incomes, actually live a similar lifestyle, own similar things. We have much more in common than what we have in differences.
SEARCH BY INCOME
One of the two best features is the ability to search by income. Once you change the income range, it automatically picks the four families, which represents the four quartiles of the income range.
In the picture below, you see this wide income range, with $494 per month representing the lowest quartile, and $3.4k/month representing the highest quartile. Once you are on the website, you can then click on each picture to see more pictures about the family. I will use the $578/month in Russia as an example.
PEAK INSIDE THE FAMILY
The second best feature is the ability to really look at the things each family owns. For example, in the Kiriny family, I get to see familiar things, even though this is a family in Russia on a different income.
LAST BUT NOT LEAST
There is also a TED Talk video. I highly recommend you checking it out.
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