Bill Gates may be on a mission to eradicate extreme poverty, but he's not going to do it by focusing on the "developing" world anymore.
"I talk about the developed and developing world all the time, but I shouldn’t," Gates wrote in a new blog post this week.
His new resolution to eradicate "developing" and "developed" from his vocabulary was spurred by the release of the book "Factfulness," written by his good friend and Swedish statistician Hans Rosling. Rosling died of pancreatic cancer last year, bit his book is out post-mortem, after his son and daughter-in-law finished the final pages for him.
Gates called it "one of the most educational books I've ever read." and said the world would be better if millions of others read it, too.
Factfulness is Rosling's final attempt to change the fatalistic ways that he says most people view the world. He wants us to know that statistically speaking, things aren't as bad as we might think. He believes we rely too much on a set of emotion-fueled "instincts" to frame the state of the world, painting a much gloomier-than-reality picture of everything from global education to healthcare and natural disasters.
One of the biggest ways he hopes to do this is by replacing the binary framework of one "developing" world pitted against another "developed" world.
Instead, he says it's more useful (and accurate) to think of world income levels in four distinct brackets. While someone living in Level 1 might use their fingers to rinse and brush their teeth each night, a person living in the Level 4 income bracket would more likely plug their electric toothbrush in for a charge when they're done sudsing up their pearly whites.
But it's not just Rosling who's changing his global income vocabulary. The World Bank now uses a similar four-tiered system to talk about income levels, too. And Gates wants to be next.
"I’m going to try to use this model moving forward," the billionaire philanthropist wrote on his blog Tuesday.
Here's how the four global income levels break down:
Level 1: People live on less than $2 a day. Rosling estimates that one billion people are living at or below this threshold. They get around on their own two barefoot feet, cook over an open flame like a cookfire, fetch water in a bucket, and sleep on the ground.
Some people living in countries like Nepal, Madagascar and Lesotho all fall into this income category.
Lesotho, Rosling says, has the lowest life expectancy of any country in the world.
Level 2: This is the income group where the majority of the world's people live. They get by on between $2 and $8 a day and might have some possessions like a bicycle, a mattress, or a gas canister for cooking at home.
Countries like Bangladesh, China, Zambia and Nigeria all have people living in this income level, but of course many Chinese and Nigerian people have much higher incomes, especially if they live in big cities.
That's one of the reasons that Rosling argues it's silly to lump entire countries and sections of the world into broad categories like "developing" versus "developed." It's meaningless.
Level 3: This is the second most populous category on Rosling's list, after level 2. People in level 3 live on anywhere from $8 a day to $32. They have running water, might own a motorbike or car, and their meals are a rich and colorful mix of foods from day to day. They also probably have electricity and a fridge, which makes things like studying and eating enough varied nutrients easier.
Egypt, Palestine, the Philippines and Rwanda all have citizens living on this level.
They might have enough money to take small vacations, and their children are generally free to finish high school, because they don't have to drop out early to make money for their family.
See the rest of the story at INSIDER
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