“My plan had worked. By bringing the data into the classroom I had been able to prove to my students that the world was not divided into two. I had finally managed to capture their misconception. Now I felt the urge to take the fight further. I realized I needed to make the data even clearer. That would help me to show more people, more convincingly, that their opinions were nothing more than unsubstantiated feelings. That would help me to shatter their illusions that they knew things that really they only felt.
Twenty years later I’m sitting in a fancy TV studio in Copenhagen in Denmark. The “divided” worldview is 20 years older, 20 years more outdated. We’re live on air, and the journalist tilts his head and says to me, “We still see an enormous difference between the small, rich world, the old Western world mostly, and then the large part.”
“But you’re totally wrong,” I reply.
Once more I explain that “poor developing countries” no longer exist as a distinct group. That there is no gap. Today, most people, 75 percent, live in middle-income countries. Not poor, not rich, but somewhere in the middle and starting to live a reasonable life. At one end of the scale there are still countries with a majority living in extreme and unacceptable poverty; at the other is the wealthy world (of North America and Europe and a few others like Japan, South Korea, and Singapore). But the vast majority are already in the middle.”
Fragmento de Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, de Hans Rosling.
PD: El primer gráfico muestra datos de hace 30 años. El segundo datos de hace un año. Cada burbuja representa un país, y su tamaño representa la población.
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