In the last twenty years, the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has almost halved. Statistics like this are readily accessible to the public, but we quickly look to pathos and ethos to fulfill our inner despair and guilt regarding what’s happening in opposing countries. In a world full of social media views and emotion, more than ever, humans perceive the world ignorantly with a view based on Western context and perspective. It’s important to analyze statistics more than leverage our views purely towards how we feel because if we live on earth, we should know a thing or two about it, as in the end, it affects us in some way. 

A majority of people in the United States have a consensus that poverty in opposing countries is eating away at their development. However, “for every 1,000 children born, 39 will die before they turn five years old. Although tragic, this is remarkable progress when compared to UNICEF’s 1990 report of 93 deaths per 1,000 births” (“World Poverty Statistics”). This shows that since 1990, the amount of children dying before the age of five has halved. Another statistic to look at regarding poverty and the developing and developed world is that as of 2017, only thirteen countries, essentially six percent of the world population, live in a developing world. This means that they have families with many children of which have difficulty surviving. Many Westerners miss out on this world view because everyone looks at statistics from the past. In 1965, there were 125 developing countries. The change between the levels of income, tourism, democracy or access to education, health care or electricity would all illustrate the same change between developing and developed countries. It’s important to acknowledge that now, most countries are in the middle of developing and developed. There is no longer a monstrous gap between the West and the rest, or between the rich and poor countries. 

An intuition that many people seek to have in today’s society, as described by the author of Factfulness, Hans Rosling is something that he calls the gap instinct. The gap instinct is an instinctual idea that makes humans feel as though they have to divide all kinds of things into two distinct and often conflicting groups, with an imaginary gap in between.  As mentioned above, the concept of developing and undeveloped worlds were two terms that many people used to describe two groups of the world. What Hans Rosling gets at is the fact that most of the time, there aren’t just two groups. Most of the time, reality is not polarized at all, and the majority of any form of data is found between the two distinct groups. To conclude, Rosling cites two ways to control your inner gap instinct- beware of comparisons of averages and beware of comparisons of extremes, as these two forms of data don’t give good perspective and context to what the data depicts. 

 A common current-day issue pertains to the limited supply of water around the world. Every day, more people weigh in on the issue, helping countries of the world find ways to purify and cleanse their water sources. Activists and philanthropist action have been one of the key factors that go on to show growth on the water issue that is so vital to human evolution and well-being.  Data from Factfulness cites that since 1980, the share of people with water from a protected source has increased from 58% to 88% in 2015. It’s important to acknowledge that this is a huge increase in improvement in what has been a mere thirty-five years.  This drastic improvement in such a short period of time continues to be overlooked and one reason why is because of the gap instinct. Too often, we focus on the extreme data, which shows that 40% of sub-Saharan Africa has no access to clean drinking water. The problem with this is that too often, the news doesn’t show us what is going on in Africa. In the Netflix documentary Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates, the philanthropy life of Bill Gates is highlighted, especially with the mention of his involvement in African water hygiene. It was noted that in 2018, Bill came out with a proposal to fix water hygiene in Africa by developing a more efficient sewage and toilet system. He ended up developing, with engineers, a toilet that was able to boil waste to then use to create energy to fuel the system (“Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates”). Innovators, philanthropists, and organizations such as The United Nations Children's Fund, or UNICEF continue to push to make the world better.  However, it’s simply the media and how we perceive the media through our gap instincts that make it seem as though the world isn’t improving.

To me, understanding the world and statistics regarding the world is very important because too often, my peers, as well as I, get the wrong picture of the world around us. This can be dangerous in some ways because it presents a false agenda that exaggerates danger or dismisses a feeling of danger. This puts people on their heels and makes them want to take action, when it might not be safe to or when it’s not needed to. Understanding news is the most important thing for future generations as the complexity and usage of ethos and pathos are stronger. If generation z can’t manage to understand the news, their understanding of the world will be in the arms of news companies that are filled with bias based on political figures and government officials' policies.

More and more people systematically view the world wrong and believe it’s bad when it’s a lot better than they think. Too often, people judge statistics or read or learn about another culture and blindly attach opinions to them. As a result, gap instincts are formed in which an issue is split into two, and debates amongst the two only bring out conflict and not compromise. Examples of these issues include poverty and water scarcity and hygiene. Human improvement in the department of poverty has improved at just as insane of a rate as water cleanliness but the two subjects continue to pop up as the most meaningful problems in the world today. It is important to acknowledge the fact that these “problems” are only considered problems based on how we choose to see the world. If we choose to look at substandard statistics that only mention the extreme highs and lows then how can we justify the relativity of the middle? How can we understand the world today if we’re looking at statistics from yesterday?  Humanity needs to acknowledge the fact that everything improves as a chain. If more of the public grow wealthier, and technology improves, then the help and actions to those who are currently poor will, of course, improve.