How is wealth to be measured?
On gapminder.org, I looked at the first article on their homepage called “Welcome to Dollar Street — where country stereotypes fall apart” The article consists of images of individuals/families with the amount of monthly income they make in USD, and the country they reside in. Contradictory to its claim, the photo article perpetuates the stereotypes that we already have of the living conditions of people in different parts of the world.
In the article, the incomes range from $25 to $10,800, and are labelled “poorest” and “richest” respectively. In the United States, an income of $10,000 a month for a family of 9 (as shown in the photograph) will probably not even make it to the middles class status.
You also get to pick from different parts of the world including: Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas. Moreover, you can choose your own income range or compare between multiple continents/countries. However, they have a lot more data from Africa and Asia than anywhere else.
What are the problems with this approach of measuring wealth?
First, the USD is not the same everywhere. The same amount of money might have different buying powers in different countries. This phenomenon is not difficult to observe at all. Say, you work at an IT firm in San Francisco making $64,000 a year and your firm allows you to work up to 3 months a year from home. So, you decide to live close to your family in Idaho for 3 months each year, paying 2/5 of the rent you would be paying in San Francisco. You still earn the same amount, but you can do a lot more with your money now. You can eat out more, take more uber rides, party every weekend, and still have leftover money you can save for your parents’ retirement! No only that, you can afford more unpaid off-days.
Moreover, the article claims that, “The everyday life looks surprisingly similar for people on the same income level across cultures and continents.” Does it now? For the first 6 months in the United Stated, I would be devastated by how expensive everything was every time I went shopping. Numerically, it is true that $1 = NRP 106 (Nepalese rupees) give or take. However, I have grown to learn that they don’t mean the same thing. I come from a fairly privileged middle-class background. Interestingly however, if I were to quit school and work 50 hours for minimum wage in Denver, I could make my family’s yearly income in about 3 months. Standard of living and quality of life depends predominantly on your income’s value or buying power in the place it is being spent, and the amount of desires it is capable of fulfilling. Living in Denver, however, if I got an average, convenient place, I would probably spend close to 3/4 of my income on rent and utilities alone, and hence, I would have a much poorer quality of life than my parents at home. In this sense, a $2 daily wage somewhere in Asia may be equivalent to an $8 per hour in the United States.
How does this data affect the way we view the world?
Disclaimer: The data in the article is not the whole problem, but it exists within a global framework of social hierarchy.
A lot of big words, let’s break it down! We live in a post-colonial world where Western European countries and the US are considered the standard against which all other countries/continents are to be measured. The former are seen as the most ideal, developed, civilized societies ahead of everyone else. Many tools have be developed to quantify this view of the world and the international monetary exchange rate is one of the more efficient ones.
While I admit that the demographic and numerical data on the website must be accurate, not all interpretations of such data show the true picture. We can look at the numbers on the website, but numbers don’t speak for themselves, and nor can the people in the photographs.
How does this view of the world affect consumer spending behavior?
Whether or not we still use the terms “first world” and “third world”, the ideas have survived. When the “third world” is shown to the “first world”, the narrative is always of a less civilized place torn with poverty, famine, war, illnesses, bankruptcy and more. They are shown as being less than and needing help from the Western world. The gapminder.org’s article paints a similar picture of Asian and African countries. The numbers fail to portray an accurate picture of the kind of lives these people have in relation to the economy of the place they reside in.
These one-sided stories told in the Western parts of the world of Asia and Africa lead to post-colonial white guilt. They become tools of a capitalist economy to commercialize charity and donations to Asian and African countries, a lot of which end up misallocating valuable resources and funding unsustainable development projects. At the end of the day, when the numbers given in the data are not put into perspective, anyone in these countries can appear to be needing financial support.
Are there other ways of measuring quality of life?
Since bigger numbers don’t always translate to better quality of life, let us look at other things we might consider to measure the same. For instance, is a person to be considered wealthy if they have more dollars than another, if they lead a really hectic life and has no time for themselves? In a lot of countries in Asia and Africa, the middle class make significantly less in dollars than the American middle class. However, their jobs are less stressful and more satisfying, they have more personal time and paid off-days, and significantly lesser unfulfilled desires. Should these not be considered when measuring a person’s quality of life?
I think quality of life depends on a lot of things like social equity, how secure you feel in the area that you live, whether you believe the government works in your good interest, and whether you are satisfied or if your economy makes you feel like you constantly need more. None of these can be depicted using USD figures, and so, the article fails horribly at portraying the real lives of the people in their photographs.
Data/Society/Decision-making Spring 2019 