Half the World Escaped Poverty. Our Language Never Caught Up.

Meet Levels — the framework that actually matches reality.

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When the world fundamentally changed over the last 50 years, Hans Rosling was there taking notes.

Sine 1950, about half our world moved out of extreme poverty and into better lives. This revolution broke all the frameworks I had about the world. Until I read Factfulness, I spoke in extremes. A country was either Developed or Developing. First World or Third World. Today, this would miss about half the world that lives in a middle income country. We don't have language to talk about the world anymore. Until Rosling gave us the words--his Levels framework.

Rosling discovered something crazy cool. The road from rags to riches moves through four distinct stages, or Levels — and no matter where you live, from Argentina to Austria, if you told him your daily income he could guess almost every material aspect about your life. What your home is made out of, where you go to the bathroom, how women in your town spend their time, and so much more. For visuals on this, visit his Dollar Street website.

The main winners of this revolution are South America and Asia. They’re on the up and up while the West is on the decline. Their populations are growing faster as are many of their economies. That's exactly why the US and China are treating them like the world's bachelorette — bending over backwards to court them into their respective spheres. However, once they pick a suitor, they'll need to drop the moniker.

You see, Global South never meant poor. French demographer Alfred Sauvy first coined the term "Third World" in 1952 to categorize unaffiliated nations to the Cold War — bench players. It became shorthand for poor countries because, well, they were poor.

Despite the rebrand to developing countries, and now the Global South, it essentially means the same thing. But as these bench players developed into coveted free agents, it’s time we retire the outdated framework. 

Levels

Level 1 is extreme poverty. In this stage, people walk barefoot for water, cook over an open fire, and live in homes constructed of natural material. In 1960, roughly 1.6 billion people lived this way. Maybe it made sense to talk in have and have nots then. But then the most rapid development in history occurred.

To visualize this global glow up, we can look at two characteristics of Level 1 countries: high rates of fertility and child mortality. In extreme poverty, women typically have 6-7 kids, with 30% dying before age 5. Below, each circle represents a country.

As our world shifted from the lower left to the upper right — toward wealthier and healthier lives — it became clear that our worldview needed an update.

The power of Rosling's Levels lies in its basis in observed reality. As the book's title suggests, these are facts. When countries rise out of poverty, they follow clear, predictable trends based on their Level, and just like personal growth, global growth isn't always linear.

Three patterns naturally emerge. The first is a straight line (okay, sometimes growth is linear). Education, a woman's age at marriage, and recreation time all go up at a constant rate as countries level up. Other things come all at once. 

On Level 2, fridges, vaccines, and literacy seem to drop from the sky, as countries go from below 50% to roughly 100% of their population having these things. Visually, this creates an S-shaped pattern. 

But the road to prosperity comes with bumps too. Traffic accidents and cavities spike on Level 3 due to the introduction of cars and candy, before tapering off due to better public safety and dental health found on Level 4. This wasn't covered in Factfulness, but I imagine debt would be another U-shaped pattern for Level 4 countries, as it has been for the US.

Then there’re doubling curves. Things that spike on certain Levels, like CO2 emissions per person when a country enters Level 4.

Predict the Future

Levels doesn’t just let us see our global counterparts, it also helps us see where they’ll be in the future. It has predictive power. Understanding these acceleration points can help us spot emerging markets and political movements before they fully manifest. From the Levels framework, it makes sense why in 2012, Obama changed our foreign policy to a "pivot to Asia."

What I love about economic development is that it comes from unlikely sources. For a first-hand account, listen to Rosling's TED Talk. Spoiler: household appliances, specifically washing machines, are a godsend. For the first time in their lives, women reclaim their most valuable commodity: time. With more free time, women enter the workforce and educate their kids. Between 1960 and 2019, 140 million women entered Level 4 in Asia. With 62% of Asia under 40, the continent will go a long way in creating our cultural and economic future.

Yet all these countries wouldn't have changed at all if viewed through the static narrative of Global South. Unfortunately, we blind ourselves to these profound shifts due to outdated narratives, missing out on the incredible ways we're improving.

As politics is typically downstream of economics, Levels also captures the biggest political theme many haven't caught onto: inequality isn't between countries anymore. It's within them. Any narrative that paints a country as a single thing wouldn't have seen populism coming — and didn't. With Levels, we can visualize that inequality.

Rather than imposing a static perspective onto the world, Levels encourages us to adopt a stance of vigilant observation — one that breaks any notion of a global binary. The Levels framework, in my view, emerges as a unifying force, revealing the incredible resilience of our world. It reminds us that we can be inspired by our collective progress, driven to address persisting inequities, and astounded by the fact that, amidst our challenges, we are living in the most abundant era in history.

Using Rosling’s data, I made a distribution of each country’s Levels. Take a look.