CHAPTER ONE : The Gap Instinct

global misconceptions
misinterpretation
global illusion
misperceive
misleading

The common misconceptions	The world is divided in two: a picture of rich and poor → While the world has changed, the outdated worldview has not, specially in ‘‘Westerners’
Key points	The world used to be divided in 2, but isn’t any longer. The idea of a divided world with a majority living in misery and deprivation is an illusion. The majority of people live in middle-income countries Divide the world in 4 income levels Level 1: 1-2 $ per day (~1 billion people) Level 2: 4$ per day(~ 3 billion people) Level 3: 16 $ per day(~ 2 billion people) Level 4: 64$ per day (1 billion people)
Proving / Data	The chart shows babies per woman and child survival rates for all countries. (1965) => WRONG → this picture shows the world in 1966 → Today families are small, and child mortality rate is low among most countries ( the the vast majority of countries ) → Graphs showing levels of income, or tourism, or democracy, or access to education, health care, or electricity would all tell the same story When being asked about income, life expectancy, undernourishment, water quality, and vaccination rates, most people mistakenly guess based on their misinformed perspectives.
Critical thinking	The old labels are popular because they are so simple Human beings have a strong dramatic instinct toward binary thinking, a basic urge to divide things into 2 distinct groups → imply conflict by overdramatic gap stories The media tend to report the extreme rather than the majority
Common warning signs	Outdated data Comparisons of averages → looking not just the averages but the spread → there is no gap at all Comparisons of extremes → the majority is right where the gap supposed to be The view from up here → looking down from above make everything look equally small, but it’s not.
Lessons	developing a fact-based worldview collect data analyze the full distribution, not just the average

Some people believe that the world is becoming more divided between rich and the poor. To what extent do you agree or disagree

As the economy is developing faster than ever, the global wealth distribution is changing too. Some people believe that the picture of the world split into the rich and the poor is more clear. I totally disagree with this point of view as our world is not only about the wealthiest or the poorest, but there is also a gap between them, which is becoming more and more widened .

Firstly, when the wars are far away in the past, our world has undergone a development, allowing many people to improve their life standards. Meanwhile, many people are still having an outdated worldview, often resulting in the act of dividing the world into “the developing” and “the developed”, or “ the West” and “the rest”, etc. In fact, this worldview is totally misleading. In his journey of teaching global fact, Hans Rosling once showed statistics of child mortality rate per woman and it represented a clear picture of two different worlds, ‘‘the developing’’ and ‘‘the developed’’, with a huge gap. However, that chart is from 1965, and now the world is completely different.

Secondly, the world today does not have only the rich and the poor, and their big, invisible gap. There is also a group of people called the middle-income, which hold 70 % of the population of the world, according to the UN. For example, in his book called ‘‘ the Factfulness ’’, Hans Rosling instead divided the world into four levels, based on an individual's income. Most of the population nowadays are in the middle levels, and there is only 1% of the global residents living in extreme poverty. Therefore, there is no bigger and bigger gap between the rich and the poor, but instead a world getting better while middle-income people are trying to live a reasonable life.

In conclusion, it is not likely that the world only includes the rich and the poor, but also a mass population of middle-income. As many aspects of life are improving, more and more people have a chance to change their life, and they are the majority who fill in the gap and make the world better.