Avicii Was Right, There're Levels To This
- Jack Connors
- Oct 16, 2024
- 4 min read
Updated: Jul 20
Hans Rosling confirms what Avicii tried to tell us, there're levels to this.
The Global South is basking in the limelight as the world's bachelorette. The courtship has the US and China bending over backwards for the geopolitical bloc, which encompasses Latin America and parts of Asia and Africa. 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. Despite the rebrand to developing countries, and now the Global South, it essentially means the same thing. However, as these bench players developed into coveted free agents, we need language to address what the Third World narrative never meant to signify; economic development.
A Binary World
Enter Hans Rosling. During his world travels, the global health expert noticed that irrespective of country to creed, humans tend to go through eerily similiar stages of development depending on their income level. As we rise our of poverty, clear patterns emerge in how women spend their time, how we get to work, where we poop and more!
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. At this moment in time, it may have made sense to use binary economic language. But then the world caught fire and 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, woman typically have 6-7 kids with 30% dying before 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 natural emerge. The first is a straight line (okay sometimes growth is linear). Education, a bridge's age, 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 drop seem to drop from the sky, as countries go from 0% to roughly 100% of their their population having these things. Visually, this creates an S-shaped pattern. But some development causes problems. 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 is a type of U shape curve. This wasn't covered this Factfulness, but I imagine debt would be another U-shaped pattern for Level 4 countries as it has been for the US.
Predict the Future
Understanding these acceleration points can help predict consumer behavior, emerging markets, female empowerment and more! For example, in 2012, Obama saw Asia's ascent into the middle class and wanted in. Our official foreign policy stance was changed 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 washer machines, are a god send. For the first time in their life, women reclaim their most valuable commodity, time. With more free time, women enter the work force and educate their kids. Between 1960 and 2019, 140 million women entered Level 4 in Asia! With 62% of Asia under 40, the young and burgeoning continent will go a long way in creating our cultural and economic future.
