Translator: Denise RQ Reviewer: Marta Palacio
I am a product manager at Gapminder.
We're a small educational foundation,
and our main goal is to create free teaching material and free software
for people to understand the world based on data.
I am here today
because I am the product lead of a project that we call Dollar Street.
Even though we are really, really early in the process of that project,
it's so fascinating,
and I have got some surprising experiences that I would like to share with you.
Dollar Street - first of all, I need to explain what that is.
That is a very easy concept.
It is a visual framework to understand the world based on data,
but in a way that is easier to understand.
The idea is to understand how everybody lives,
and we sort people by income like this.
So, imagine the world as a street.
You have the poorest to the far left up here,
and the richest to the far right.
And everybody else in the world lives somewhere in between;
quite easy, right?
I sent out photographers to homes all over the world
on all different income levels.
And in these homes, the photographer capture images and video snippets
of how people actually eat, how they prepare their food,
what their toilet looks like, and how they sleep;
all these kind of things.
But not only these three I was mentioning but actually about 200 things
in a systematic way, in all these homes across the world.
So far, we have been to 36 countries,
capturing 195 homes all over the world
on all these different income levels.
And in each home, I have to mention as well,
we are not only capturing the photos and videos,
because to able to calculate
where the home belongs on the Dollar Street,
we also need to gather some information
about the household, about if it's owned or rented;
how many household members, what they work with,
what they earn, and so on.
So that is sort of the basic concept.
Here are a fraction, a few of the families we have already met.
And, of course, being here in Latvia,
I couldn't resist getting a few homes here, as well.
So, here we have four homes.
I completely understand I will not be able to explain
the whole Latvian society by four more or less random homes,
but at least, it is a way for you to get a sneak peek of the idea.
We have two homes in Riga and two homes on the countryside.
First, we have the Baloži family living in Gulbene.
We have the Jerjomini in Skrīveri.
We have the Andrejevi in Riga.
And we also have the Lokometi in Riga.
These families vary in many different ways.
They have different religions, they have different incomes,
different occupations, different houses,
different styles of decorating their homes, and so on.
And just to give you a sneak peek of what it could look like,
since we are doing this systematic photo-documentation
in each and every home,
we could look at the beds and the sofas.
Here, we see four different beds in Latvia.
We can see the sofas.
We sort of knew that there is a variation within each country.
The income is distributed across a wide range.
We also have all these special ideas about how we want to decorate and so on.
Now, I'm going to tell you what was my first real surprise.
Instead of continuing showing you 200 comparisons
with these four homes within Latvia
- I think you might be bored even though we have cool categories -
I'm going to do something that has been surprising me quite a lot.
Actually, that is when you start comparing across countries.
So, we take these four Latvian homes,
and we start comparing them with other countries.
First, we look at this sofa. This is a sofa in China; a living room.
You can see it's like a normal, non-staged everyday living room.
If your remember the sofa we saw in Latvia recently,
you can see they are quite alike.
It's like a leather sofa, some beige greyish.
Even the legs have the same shape.
And you have these huge window sets
that are quite alike in this apartment building.
Starting comparing imagery like this,
we can look at fruit bowls in Kenya and Latvia.
And I agree here, of course, the fruits may differ a little bit,
but the idea is the same.
That we put a bowl with fruit visually in our kitchen.
Or pink combs in Vietnam and Latvia.
It's quite hard to distinguish which one is the Latvian comb.
Or book shelves, toilet paper, wardrobes, shoe racks,
lamps, shoes.
The nicest shoes you have is one of the categories.
And you see it's some pinkish with these little details.
The pet tends to be a black dog;
the carpets, the bar of soap,
the air conditioner, the washing machine,
the wall clock, the iPhone
(Laughter)
the laptop, and the flat TV.
I mean, looking at these,
we see the similarities are quite striking.
But, on one hand, you shouldn't be surprised,
because we all know that, of course, with this globalized economy,
we tend to consume almost the same.
And we can see here, I think, that the cultural aspects
of how we decorate our homes is sort of diminishing.
If I was put inside any of these homes, I would have a hard time standing there
if I had no idea in what country I was put,
it would actually be hard for me to distinguish in what country I was in,
because we share the same artifacts in our homes.
Of course, this was for the rich homes.
This is what the world income distribution looks like.
The mountain shape is the amount of people in the world.
And right now, Latvia is somewhere here at the top.
The homes I showed you are extremely roughly somewhere here.
Of course, you have more homes further up and further down the street.
To simplify the shape of the mountain, we could say
that the seven billion people of the world are distributed something like this.
When I was doing the comparisons with Latvia and the other countries,
I was basically comparing the top 1 billion richest of the world.
But what about the majority, the other six billion people in the world?
What does it look like
if we go to the absolute poorest, the extremely poor?
What would it look like there?
Here, we have the [Kabore] family in Burkina Faso.
They live in this house, and they sleep on this bed.
When we talk about extreme poverty, we very often think about Africa,
but in fact, most people actually live in Asia;
so, going to Asia, meeting this family - the Chowdhury family in India instead.
We go into their home, and we see they also sleep on a mat on the floor
in the same manner.
If we put these pictures next to each other,
we can see their lives are quite similar.
And we see the same if we look at roofs:
Papua New Guinea in Asia, Burundi in Africa;
or wardrobes in Liberia and India;
or how you cook your food in India and Malawi;
how you store your salt in Papua New Guinea and Burundi;
how you eat in India and Burkina Faso.
If you have a spoon,
it will look like this in Ivory Coast or India.
And for most extremely poor, you have no toilet,
you use the bush or the field.
And this is what it could look like in Nigeria.
And you would have the same experience if you were in Nepal.
So, now we've been looking
at the absolute poorest, the extremely poorest.
We've seen that even in that group,
we have the exact same similarities as we could find in the richest group.
Not even here we have these cultural differences.
But what about the middle income, where we have five billion people,
most of the people?
I know it's a rough thing to generalize five billion people,
so you have to bear in mind that this group is quite rough.
But it's neither the extremely poor, neither the extremely rich.
So, here, a family in Bolivia, a family in Indonesia,
a family in Tunisia,
a family in urban Kenya.
What do they have in common?
Well, what they share is actually that they're families with just two kids.
And that is what is most typical for the human population today -
that we have diminished the family sizes down to two,
and you see it across all geographical regions.
If we look into the homes on this level, what would we find?
Well, a wardrobe,
a light bulb, salt
- Quite fascinating, we see the variation in the lid color,
but except for that,
the system of how you store your salt is quite the same all over -
beds,
even how you store your cutlery.
Look at the mugs, one of them has flowers and the other one, a tree.
So, there are some differences.
And then how you store your pens in a small little box;
your sewing machine, or your roof,
or your walls, or even your toys.
On this middle income, you will find that the kids start having
these real plastic toys that will have some size.
It might be dolls, or cars, or so.
And even the waste is similar.
You cannot tell by the waste dump in what country you are,
because in this income level,
we still haven't solved the waste management completely.
For me, this has been a really big surprise,
seeing that the world is much easier to understand
by economy than by culture.
And it's the same for the richest, for the poorest, and for the middle.
So why come?
Well, when we live up here, in the richest billion,
we have a hard time understanding the world,
because this is of something of the poorest we might have seen.
But still, it's a real wall, you have electricity,
you have a handle, you have a real door, and so on.
And we have a hard time distinguishing what life is like on lower income levels.
So, when we stand here,
we have first-hand information about life in our income group,
but everything else is a bit blurry.
So we rely on other images;
unfortunately, they are often quite skewed.
We rely on imagery of catastrophes,
conflicts, refugees.
And remember, it's only 0.7% of the world population who are refugees.
All these images are of extraordinary event,
because that is the news logic.
You cannot make news of everyday life.
It has to be the exceptions.
And from the poorer six billion,
we only see the exceptions, and they add up,
and then we get these weird, weird ideas about people.
We'll also see this: paradise beaches,
rare beautiful animals, minorities,
and weird cultures that are quite hard to understand.
And the world becomes very, very strange.
So we rely on stereotypes to understand how the others six billion people live.
So, to remember what the world looks like,
families in general have two kids,
we have the same way of solving our needs;
for the poorest, it might look like this.
Similar, even in the middle, and similar for the richest.
So what is Dollar Street?
Dollar Street - the project - now it is the world's biggest photo database,
where we store systematic home documentations
for all over the world.
But as you can understand, to make the comparisons even better,
we actually need more homes.
So if you feel an eager of adding your home to this global comparisons,
you are more than welcome.
Thank you.
(Applause)