What do you use for a toothbrush if you’re making less than $50 a month?
What do you use for a toothbrush if you’re making less than $50 a month?
....
In a Malawi household that brings in less than a $50 per month, a toothbrush is basically just a stick or two fingers.
This sucks.
But this is not what most of the world is like.
For most people, a toothbrush is affordable and accessible.
And you won’t see much difference in toothbrushes between the family making $200 in South Africa vs. $1,000 in Ukraine vs. $5000 per month in the Netherlands.
I mean, I still use a regular old toothbrush, don’t you?
Toothbrushes from around the world…
This super interesting site Dollar Street (developed by Hans Rosling and his team) lets you compare how people live all around the world based on their monthly income. Go through the site and you’ll notice a lot of similarities and differences, and you might find it really eye-opening.
On one hand it shows the disparity and wide range of wealth and how people live across the world. On the other hand, you’ll see that most people are NOT at either end of the spectrum -- they are not extremely poor or extremely rich, but somewhere in between. The bed of a family making $300/month in Vietnam doesn’t look too different than a family making three times that much in Portugal.
For “us” in the West making a $100 day, we often look at the world and see people making an order of magnitude ($10 a day) or two orders of magnitude ($1 a day) less than us. We lump them into the same group and refer to everyone as “them” in the Third World, or “the other half.” That’s like grouping someone making $1,000 a day in the same category as making $10,000 a day. Clearly, there’s a big difference, and a 10x difference in income is huge, even if it doesn’t seem big to you.
Fifty years ago, there was much larger wealth disparity in the world - many people were living in extreme poverty on $1-2 a day.
But in the past 25 years, over 1 billion people have come out of extreme poverty (using your finger vs. actually getting a toothbrush).
The global life expectancy today is about 70 years old which is higher than almost any country fifty years ago.
Child mortality is at an all time low, and 9 in 10 infants worldwide received a vaccination in 2017.
Thanks to a lot of social, economic and political progress, the world looks a lot different today than it did 50 years ago.
The majority of people in the world are living in middle-income countries (income of $1,000-$4,000 USD/year) where their basic necessities are met -- food, water, electricity, shelter, basic access to healthcare and basic education.
That’s five billion people out of the seven billion in the world who live on about $10 a day! This means that labels of “we” in the Western world and “them” in the Third World no longer represent reality.
Yes, there are hundreds of millions who are still in the extreme poverty category, and there’s a lot of work to be done. But the progress we’ve made should give you hope. The reality is that most people in the world do have electricity, shoes, soap, phones, chairs, TVs, living rooms, access to vaccinations, and a roof over their heads.
That’s pretty amazing if you think about it!
The world is certainly a better place then it was before, and a lot better than the doom-and-gloom that the media seems to constantly focus on.
If this doesn’t put a smile on your face, then I don’t know what will.
(for more on this topic, check out Hans Rosling’s great videos and recent book)