189 – How do people really live around the world?

[00:00:06] Lily: Hello and welcome to the IDEMS podcast. I’m Lily Clements, a Data Scientist, and I’m here with David Stern, a founding director of IDEMS. Hi, David.

[00:00:15] David: Hi Lily. How are you doing?

[00:00:16] Lily: Yes. Yeah, I’m all right.

I’ve been reading a book lately, Factfulness, by Hans Rosling, reading it several years later than it came out. I think it came out in 2017, and I’ve only just got my hands on it.

[00:00:29] David: Beautiful communicator. So many elements of the world we live in, in terms of international development have come out of the visualisations he produced.

[00:00:42] Lily: And I’ve not finished it, let’s say that, so no spoilers. Of course, I’ve come across Gapminder, which is this foundation, I think that he’s, or was a part of before he passed away, with his son and daughter-in-law. I always see their beautiful visualisations that really make you question the world. I would say that some of those graphics that you look at, and the more you see, the more you see there is to say.

[00:01:04] David: Yeah, absolutely. The first visualisation he had, which really I’ve seen the transformation in the world communities based on those visualisations showed the difference between nations, and in particular nations where over the previous 30, 40 years, there had been a lot of progress, and in other nations there hadn’t been progress based on key indicators. And in people’s minds that progress hasn’t happened.

And the way he put it, you know, he did this sort of thing with his students where it wasn’t that the students, as he put it, did significantly worse than monkeys would have because monkeys would’ve done things at random, where these students had misinformation, they had done things based on information they were taught that was out of date. So this was a comment and the way he framed this was beautiful.

[00:02:09] Lily: Yeah. And he’s put bits of that throughout the book. Not that I’m trying to advocate the book too much. Well, it’s a great book, but not that I’m trying to sell the book. But for example, there’s questions like that throughout the book, one question is, you know, where does the majority of the world population live? Is it in low income countries, middle income countries, or high income countries?

And that’s one of those examples, as you say, of, 33% of monkeys would’ve got that correct it’s a one in three chance, but actually you get that misinformation with humans answering it because they don’t get it correct.

[00:02:38] David: Yeah.

[00:02:39] Lily: But lots of questions throughout the book like that. And actually one graphic that I really like, which is early on in it, is this graph that shows how we’ve divided developing and developed nations up. And is a very clear divide there of developing, to developed in how the graphic looks. I think the idea is how many children, people have, women have, against the number that survive. Yeah babies per woman against children surviving to age five.

And you see that, okay, in the developing nations a lot fewer children survive to age five. And you see that graphic and you’re like, okay, this is how we define developing and developed, this makes sense. And then you turn a page and they go, oh, but by the way, that graphic was from like 1960 or 1970, this is how it looks now. And it looks pretty much the same now, there’s not much difference there between your two, well, categories.

[00:03:29] David: Exactly. The progress that’s been made on some of these health indicators is incredible.

[00:03:35] Lily: Yeah. Yeah. And I guess that leads into the kind of main thing I wanted to touch on today, which is something that, you know, throughout growing up at school and things, it was very much the terms of developing and developed, throughout the last seven, eight years of working with you and through Africa, I’ve kind of been a little bit confused because, well, where are the people that can’t get their water? I can’t see them here, so they’re not where I’m working.

You kind of have this idea in your mind from media, from TV and things, but as it turns out, it’s not actually that black and white. And it was reading this book, and actually instead of having these kind of binary terms of developing and developed, instead having these four levels.

[00:04:18] David: Well, yes, this is actually also where, if you think of these four levels, maybe you should say what the four levels are, and then we can build from there.

[00:04:27] Lily: Okay. I’ll try and summarise the four levels without reading it from the book directly. Level one is your kind of extreme poverty. And I would say that this is probably what you see on the adverts on TV, or what I’ve seen on the adverts on TV and what is kind of thought of when you talk about poverty in Africa, you know, children are walking, families are walking far distances to get water from a far source, there’s no grid often, children often aren’t in school, if you kind of have a child that gets unwell and they need antibiotics, there’s not much you can do and they probably won’t survive.

[00:05:04] David: This is probably a eighth of the world’s population, about a billion people, give or take. This is something like one to two dollars a day in economic terms on this.

[00:05:19] Lily: Yeah, well, the book’s from 2017, and so I’m not sure if there’s a more updated version in the last kind of eight years.

[00:05:25] David: Very little progress has happened in the last eight years. It’s something where a lot of people have put effort into this problem, but it is a problem which is extremely persistent. That very bottom group is hard to reach by definition.

[00:05:40] Lily: So why, what makes that bottom group hard to reach? I guess if it’s off grid, then that makes it difficult in terms of interventions.

[00:05:47] David: Well, yes, by definition almost. Reaching that group, they’re almost always in hard to reach places. They have a lifestyle which is very different to those that relate to the global economy. They don’t necessarily have access to the sort of standard infrastructure that is needed. By definition, if you are close to a road, you get more economic opportunity than this, they’re often very isolated in different ways.

They might be also related to, you know, some of these relate to war. They relate to, you know, extreme situations within difficult environments. We work a lot in difficult environments, but we don’t work very much in the extreme situations in those difficult environments.

[00:06:35] Lily: I mean, I should know where we work, right. But it’s useful for me to know kind of the scale and where we fit in on or where what we’re doing and who we’re working with, where they are on these various, on this scale is really interesting.

[00:06:49] David: Yeah, and in some of our work, we have desires to engage in this particular extreme group, but it isn’t the majority of our work because a lot of our work, it’s just beyond what we can, it’s the people on the fringes in the most difficult environment. It’s a very difficult, challenging group to work with. And almost always, the problems are multifaceted, there’s so many things to work on within those communities.

[00:07:23] Lily: Okay. So as you say, this is kind of 1 billion, eighth of the population, is on this level. And as you say as well, it’s kind of your one to two dollar a day.

But then you move into level two and we start to see a lot more kind of progress. Here, Roslin argues that this is your $4 a day mark. And so now you can kind of buy food that you didn’t have to grow yourself. You might be able to afford things like chickens. You might be able to afford livestock. You might have a hand pump around so that you can get things like water a lot more easily. If you fell ill or if someone fell ill, you might fall into level one by an illness. But it can be something you might be able to afford.

[00:08:03] David: A lot of kids in that area would be going to school or attending some form of schooling, maybe not getting out of schooling, but at least going through schooling in different ways. And this, my guess is you are looking at roughly, combined with the bottom level, about half the world’s population.

[00:08:21] Lily: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. That’s an interesting way to put it. The book says roughly 3 billion. So your guess is very much in line.

[00:08:30] David: Well, and I would argue this sort of group is one of the ones that we interact with and we work with the most. No, maybe not the most, but I think it’s, these are in most of our different projects in low resource environments, I would argue these relate to our core target audiences.

[00:08:55] Lily: Okay.

[00:08:55] David: And they are changing rapidly. You know, whether it’s $4 a day, $5 a day, what the cutoff point is, you know exactly the characteristics of that group are so dependent on context, the schooling available, what the healthcare available is country to country. But this is a large proportion of the world’s population, and this is a, this is a group which, I would argue, a lot of work is needed, but a lot of work is happening to serve this community.

[00:09:30] Lily: Yeah. And what I find interesting about this levels system is, as a mathematician or as someone who’s a mathematical scientist, it can be very easy to look at these things as very black and white of like, okay, everyone on this level has these characteristics, which obviously isn’t the case, just the kind of profile of someone who might be on this level.

But what I do like is this kind of notion of how you can essentially, potentially, move between levels. I know it’s not as simple as you just move between levels, whereas going from developing to developed, I feel that that has a big step, or that’s kind of across countries. This country’s developing and this country’s developed. Whereas with these levels, it’s more within a country that you have some people at this level and some people at that level.

[00:10:17] David: Absolutely. And I think these two are not in contradiction with one another. There are in many, I would argue, wealthy nations, you don’t have many people in level one, but you do have people in the equivalent of level two, whatever that looks like.

Many would argue that levels one and two are termed in poverty. You know, these are levels which are in poverty in different ways. These are not relative poverty, but absolute poverty. And it’s possibly true that in some countries you only have people in relative poverty rather than absolute poverty.

But this level two is interesting because it is one where most of the problems facing level two, most of the challenges they face do relate to this hope for the future. Whereas quite often in level one, it is a survival existence. In level two already, there’s often this sort of, this sense of progress, of hope for the future coming in, that you have elements of opportunity that exist even at these levels of absolute poverty.

[00:11:35] Lily: And then we go into level three, where you might have multiple jobs, but they kind of say it’s around $16 a day, is what’s argued, and you know, you might have a cold water tap so you don’t have to fetch water. You might have electricity, so the kids’ homework can improve and your children are in education. You might be able to buy a fridge and serve different foods every day. You might have a motorbike so that you can now travel to different jobs. And it might be that you have a accident or that you fall ill and that might mean that kind of your children’s education savings has to go on to pay for your medical.

But you have savings there. I mean, it’s obviously not a easy place to be in, but it’s this notion that you kind of have those savings, you’re not at this absolute extreme poverty.

[00:12:21] David: Well, let’s think of this in different ways. So, $16 a day, over a month this corresponds to sort of give or take $500 a month.

[00:12:31] Lily: Sure.

[00:12:32] David: $500 a month, you know, in many of the low resource environments we work, that is middle class. So you are now in some form of middle class within your societies, whatever that looks like in different ways. And this often relates to levels of education, but quite a lot of the world now is in this sort of lifestyle, if you want.

Now, if you think about this in other ways, you know, your $500 a month, in the UK this is much less than the minimum wage. There might be people living on this in the UK, but there’s not many. Definitely in the UK you are in poverty.

This really is where you now would probably be having people in this category in different countries, but it looks very different. You know, if you just think about the amount of money per month, this now isn’t a good way of thinking about this. Because what your 500 dollars a month, in some context, you are living pretty well. Whereas in other contexts, you can’t get by, you can’t put a house over your head.

[00:13:43] Lily: Yes.

[00:13:43] David: The parallel of actually thinking of this in terms of what this corresponds to financially, you start to see this really is so context dependent. And so this category, if you want, is one where it is difficult to think of five hundred dollars a month being people who are well off in society. But in certain countries, that is definitely the case.

You know, in Ethiopia, at this order of magnitude, you can live well. Maybe not in Addis, but in many parts of the country. And this is again, where now within the country, well, are you urban or are you rural? Actually, the same amount of money goes much further in a rural context, which is a very interesting thought. But it’s much harder to have electricity in a rural context than it is in an urban context, where electricity is more easily available.

Now, you get into a lot of complexities around this and around these descriptions in ways that I think are really quite important. What I think is interesting is, I don’t know what the numbers were when he did this, but you know, the general way I’ve seen this is, maybe within your top half, this is more than half of it. You know, you have maybe a billion who are better off than this, and then the rest of your top half is in this sort of stage. So maybe another 3 billion, as an order of magnitude, maybe the same as in group two, give or take would be my guesstimate.

[00:15:17] Lily: Yeah he said 2 billion, so he’s done it out of 7 billion, which I think we’re now 8 billion as a population. Maybe then fewer than who are in level two, but more than who are in level four

[00:15:30] David: And it would be interesting to know, I don’t know the latest numbers on this, it would be interesting to see. But it is the divisions between levels two and this group, which is one of the places where maybe some progress has been made. And so it wouldn’t surprise me if you now had similar numbers here than in level two or maybe even more here than in level two.

[00:15:54] Lily: Oh okay.

[00:15:54] David: My guess is that you are probably not having proportionally, well, you’re probably not having much more than a billion in your top level again, depending on how it’s defined. So I don’t know whether your top level has increased that much because of the, well, the way societies have developed. But, yeah, this group may have progressed over the last eight years or so.

[00:16:19] Lily: Yeah, and I think that this is the group that can be the least known or understood. So I was speaking to Maxwell, who is from Kenya as you know, he used to work with INNODEMS and he’s now elsewhere, but he’s now in Finland doing his masters. And he said to me that when he moved to Finland, he was like asked by people how far he had to travel for water and things, and he found this very confusing, or it was surprising that he had a smartphone. He found this very, like, why is this surprising that I’ve got these things?

And this, I think is where, for me personally, is where I think that there’s quite a gap in knowledge, there’s a gap in knowledge, at least in my world and in my upbringing, there was a gap in the knowledge of this existence of level three.

[00:17:07] David: Which is of course if you go into many low resource countries, it’s not 50% of your population in many of them, I would guess it’s more like 20 to 30%. But you know, 20, 30% of your population at least, would be in this sort of level three, even in very low resource environments. Quite a lot of the people who succeed would be coming out of this level because they get access to a better education, because they have the resources and the connections to make these things happen.

So, quite often these are a lot of the successful, or a lot of success stories do come out of this group. And in many other cases, success is to get into this group.

[00:17:53] Lily: Interesting.

And then we come to level four, which, for me, it’s obviously the level I know best. They describe it in the book as, you know, you have more than $32 a day. Getting an extra kind of $3 a day here or there is not life changing. So it’s hard to imagine that at level one that $3 literally moves you from kind of that level one to level two.

Of course, as you say, $32 a day in some countries would not be a level four income.

[00:18:22] David: Well, this is an interesting question. So this is a thousand dollars a month.

[00:18:27] Lily: Okay.

[00:18:28] David: In the UK, a thousand dollars a month, which is sort of 800 pounds a month, you know, this is not a good salary. But this is sort of something where, you know, as a student, many students would be living on that sort of order of magnitude. And they wouldn’t be in poverty at that. You’re not well off, but in terms of the global economy you are. So being at least as well off as somebody who’s able to earn 800 to a thousand pounds a month, this is not huge.

This is still lower than the minimum wage if you have a nine to five job, but many people can’t get a nine to five job. Many people are part of the sort of gig economy. You know, a zero hour contract where you can only get minimum wage salary for sort of a half time, and you are roughly there.

[00:19:22] Lily: Yeah, no, that’s a much, that’s a good way to put it, of course, of course. And I guess just other things that the book touches on, because it’s not just about income, it’s also about different areas. Like you might have been on an airplane for holiday, you kind of have at least 12 years of education, you might eat out once a month, you have hot and cold water taps, and these sort of ideas.

[00:19:43] David: This is something where, this being your sort of base level, you know, there’s a billion people around the world who are in this sort of level, and they exist in every country, this is important. This is something where in some countries almost all your population would live in this category and in other countries, a small proportion would live in this category. But in every country there will be people living in this category.

And what’s really, I think, important is that actually in terms of data and looking at this, because you are comparing such different things, these categories are useful to change mindsets and to get people thinking differently, but they’re not actually great measures. So if you were to actually categorise people into which category do you lie in, it isn’t that useful.

However, what does happen quite a lot is if you look at the sort of work that we do in international development, there has been a big push, and I would argue a lot of this can be attributed back to, maybe not Hans Rosling himself, but the work that he did and with others and many others have done communicating these ideas. And so in most cases when you are working in international development now, you have to make the case of how what you’re doing is going to reach people on less than $5 a day. Those are the people that you know really need the help, this is your categories one and two.

And there is this recognition that if you are going to really improve livelihoods in low resource environments, it is cost effective to improve livelihoods in one and two compared to three and four in those environments, because you can reach many more people and you can really make a difference in people’s lives.

So that is a priority we see time and time again in all sorts of grant applications, in reporting requirements, there’s a lot of emphasis on people under $5 and people under $2 a day on average. And there were ways that that has been adjusted. So there are elements of how you adjust that to different contexts so that in high resource environments people in relative poverty are recognised, because that was a big problem.

And it is important to say that, you know, in high resource environments, somebody who cannot get a roof over their head, even if they are earning quite a lot, and there were some very interesting cases of this, of people working two jobs but still not able to get a house and being homeless despite being in work, working two jobs and earning. But being able in low paid jobs, in certain environments, in high resource environments, actually, you know, that doesn’t mean you automatically have somewhere to live.

These are different sorts of issues, which are big issues and really important. Homelessness, when you are working in a high resource environment, these are structural issues more than they are absolute poverty issues. They’re relative, but they are big, big issues.

[00:23:25] Lily: I suppose as well, like having it split into, for me anyway, having it split into these kind of different categories, helps with when it comes to design or helps when it comes to, I guess, planning, okay, who are we going to target and how are we going to target, knowing that actually level one to level two, that two to three to $4 a day difference doesn’t feel like it’s a lot. But actually if you look at how that can, how level one lives versus how level two could live, how they both might be having their day-to-day, this kind of level structure could be very useful in shaping like how you might design or how you might help.

[00:24:10] David: Well, yes and no. This is what’s so interesting. Does level two have access to a phone is a very interesting question.

[00:24:19] Lily: Yeah. It doesn’t say in the book, let me check.

[00:24:23] David: Well, even if they give an example in the book, this depends on the context.

[00:24:29] Lily: Yeah, okay.

[00:24:30] David: You know, you take Uganda versus Tanzania, the poverty levels in different contexts are actually relatively similar, but the phone penetration is totally different. And so the context determines elements of livelihood, which you cannot take for granted across context. And those elements of livelihood, of what people might have access to or what they might not have access, and I’ll give you another very concrete example from the West African region where we do quite a lot of work.

These are really tough environments. But even within them, even within the same region, the same countries, is manpower or land the limiting factor? You know, if you are in a rural environment, is access to land limiting your family or is access to manpower limiting the land you can cultivate? These depend on the context, they depend on where you are in the country, how close you might be to a road. If you are close to a road, often it’s the land, which is the limiting factor. Whereas if you are a long way from a road, no, quite often it’s the manpower.

[00:25:47] Lily: Interesting.

[00:25:48] David: So, these things, they can depend on your local infrastructure, and it makes a big difference. I love some research which has been going on, this is the Collaborative Crop Research Program, which has now become the Global Collaboration for Resilient Food Systems, which has exposed me to a lot of the subtleties of some of this. But I love the fact that the studies that they’ve had about sort of dual purpose crops, should you have more fodder produced by your crops or more grains?

Well, often the determining factor on that is how easy is it to transport your fodder to the nearest city? Urban centers have lots of animals that need fodder and they are willing to pay money to be able to use this. So if you are close enough to be able to transport your fodder to the nearest urban center, then your fodder becomes more valuable than the grain.

If you are further away or your access, your transport links are less, then fodder, you can’t use it, you’ve got as much fodder as you can use locally, so that’s not the limiting factor. Grains are much more, relative to their weight, where if you’re gonna have to transport them out or take them out, they’re more valuable. So there you almost certainly want more grains than fodder.

And if you are somewhere in between, then you might need the balance. Now, of course, this might depend from family to family, and in those contexts they talk about this, how some of the wealthier people in the village have different priorities to some of the poorer people in the village, in the same context.

And their needs will change, but this affects what varieties you are growing, whether you are living in more of a cash economy because you are selling your fodder, or you are living in a place where you maybe have your mix of animals and crops yourself. All these choices can in many ways be personal preferences, but they depend on all sorts of things, including infrastructure.

And that balance of, you know, what happens if your road gets tarmacked? Just think about this for a second because this is something where there are big projects happening all over the world, you know, even in Europe, even in the US, where people are still building infrastructure, new roads. But what does a new road do in a really low resource environment? And what difference does that make?

These are really interesting questions. That’s why so much effort goes into infrastructure building in different ways because it can transform livelihoods and opportunities. But at the same time, before you had your new road, maybe you didn’t have as many accidents, you didn’t have to worry about the car accidents. You know, after you get the new road, you are now better off, you can have a motorbike, and that means your probability of being in an accident is much higher. But your chance of getting to a healthcare facility when you need is also higher.

What are the developments we’re wanting to see? And the big question, which I love on this is, well, where are we wanting the development to happen? If you’re in a very low resource environment, if you want people to get access to electricity, the easiest way to do is to move them into cities. Once they’re in cities, it’s very easy to get them infrastructure and electricity and these different things.

[00:29:26] Lily: Yeah.

[00:29:27] David: But is moving towards a more urban population rather than a rural population beneficial? Is it beneficial for livelihoods? Is it beneficial for the individuals? Is it beneficial for the society? I don’t know. These are hard questions. What I do know is that most cases have a very specific viewpoint in development projects and others, which does relate to actually potentially changing lifestyles as well as livelihoods. You are making decisions of how you are changing infrastructure, you are making decisions, which then change lifestyles.

And the intricacies of the relationship between livelihood, lifestyles and these different levels are very, very interesting because there’s a number of documented cases, the one which I know was tragic in India was effort to sort of make agriculture more commercial ended up leading to a lot of farmer suicides because, actually, this got them trapped into commercial cycles, which weren’t good for their livelihood or lifestyle.

These are really interesting, difficult questions, as this work we’ve been doing with CASAS, which relates to mathematical modelling, the systems modelling around these things, where you can actually ask some of these more complex questions. But they are complex questions.

[00:31:15] Lily: No, this is incredibly interesting. And I feel that this could very easily go into a whole new discussion in of itself. I feel this is a good place to stop in terms of the levels, but I’ve really enjoyed this conversation.

[00:31:26] David: Thank you for bringing this up because Hans Rosling has been one of the most influential, I’m gonna call him a data scientist. He was a health professional, but he used data visualisations in ways which, you know, the expression that I loved from him was, let my data set change your mindset, which did change the way people saw the world, how people were able to perceive it.

And the thing which I think is so important to remember on this, is that these powerful data visualisations, which can change people’s preconceptions, don’t come with the answer. If you had a preconception, they can help to break that misconception.

[00:32:18] Lily: Yeah.

[00:32:18] David: But seeing the word in these four categories, it doesn’t suddenly make it easy. That complexity has layers and depth to it, and context is critical. And a lot of what these beautiful visualisations do is they cut across context rather than digging into it.

[00:32:41] Lily: Well, thank you very much, David. It’s been a really good discussion, a really interesting discussion. Thank you.

[00:32:45] David: Yeah. Thank you for bringing the topic.