Dollar Street Survey Shows Household Income Trumps National Culture

See how the rest of the world lives, organized by income | Anna Rosling Rönnlund — TED

TED

Photographic evidence across 50 nations demonstrates that everyday living conditions and household habits are governed by purchasing power rather than geography or religion.

AI-assisted summary of See how the rest of the world lives, organized by income | Anna Rosling Rönnlund — original source. Check the original for full context.

Source published: 2018-01-18

Key ideas

The Dollar Street project addresses distorted global perceptions by documenting everyday life across 264 homes in 50 countries, capturing roughly 40,000 photos of 135 standardized household items. (0:13)
Living conditions, domestic items, and daily routines are determined primarily by household income rather than country, culture, or religion. (8:00)
Internal economic inequality within individual countries like China and the United States often mirrors the entire global spectrum of living conditions. (5:09)
About 5 billion of the world's 7 billion people inhabit a global middle tier characterized by electricity, non-leaking roofs, footwear, mobile phones, and plastic utensils. (8:00)

Detailed notes

## Background Published on YouTube by TED on January 18, 2018, this talk features Anna Rosling Rönnlund presenting her Dollar Street project. According to the video description, the initiative dispatched documentary photographers to 264 homes across 50 countries to catalog everyday items—including beds, stoves, toilets, and toys—illustrating how data visualization can illuminate the reality of global living conditions across every income bracket.

## TL;DR Anna Rosling Rönnlund challenges distorted media portrayals by conceptualizing the world's population along a single street ordered strictly from poorest to richest by household income. Drawing on the Dollar Street project's catalog of standardized household photographs, she uses images of ordinary items like front doors, toilets, and toothbrushes as empirical data to compare living conditions worldwide. The presentation demonstrates that daily material routines are governed by purchasing power rather than geography, religion, or culture, revealing striking domestic similarities between families in the same income tier on opposite sides of the planet. By replacing exoticized stereotypes with relatable domestic realities, the talk offers an evidence-based call to action and a grounded sense of shared humanity.

## Atmosphere & style The presentation carries an engaging, intellectually clarifying, and deeply human tone, transforming abstract demographic statistics into tangible domestic spaces. Rosling Rönnlund speaks with warm candor and gentle humor, playfully leaning into the awkward intimacy of examining strangers' private toilets and toothbrushing routines before a live audience. The narrative arc guides viewers from the disorientation of sensationalist news headlines into a revelatory, grounded perspective, leaving the audience with an inspiring sense of empathy and quiet optimism.

## Bulletin - [00:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4L130DkdOw&t=13s) The Dollar Street project addresses distorted global perceptions by documenting everyday life across 264 homes in 50 countries, capturing roughly 40,000 photos of 135 standardized household items. - [08:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4L130DkdOw&t=480s) Living conditions, domestic items, and daily routines are determined primarily by household income rather than country, culture, or religion. - [05:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4L130DkdOw&t=309s) Internal economic inequality within individual countries like China and the United States often mirrors the entire global spectrum of living conditions. - [08:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4L130DkdOw&t=480s) About 5 billion of the world's 7 billion people inhabit a global middle tier characterized by electricity, non-leaking roofs, footwear, mobile phones, and plastic utensils.

## Key takeaways - [00:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4L130DkdOw&t=13s) Public understanding of global living conditions is warped by extreme media depictions of catastrophes, violence, or idyllic vacations. - [00:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4L130DkdOw&t=13s) Conceptualizing the world as a single street organizes all 7 billion people purely by income from poorest to richest rather than by nationality. - [00:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4L130DkdOw&t=13s) People living in wealthy nations often mistakenly believe they reside in the global middle rather than at the very top of the income spectrum. - [00:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4L130DkdOw&t=13s) Dollar Street uses standardized photo documentation of around 135 everyday items per household to transform photography into empirical data. - [02:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4L130DkdOw&t=140s) Comparing domestic spaces like bedrooms, front doors, and toilets shows high consistency among affluent homes across diverse countries such as China, Nepal, France, and the US. - [05:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4L130DkdOw&t=309s) Basic hygiene routines, including tooth brushing, follow a precise material progression based on wealth, ranging from mud and sticks to shared toothbrushes and individual branded brushes. - [05:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4L130DkdOw&t=309s) Examining cooking stoves across households in China demonstrates that domestic methods reflect purchasing power rather than uniform national traditions. - [08:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4L130DkdOw&t=480s) Affluent households in China and the United States share near-identical consumer furnishings, such as matching leather couches and children's play sets. - [08:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4L130DkdOw&t=480s) The poorest 1 billion people across different continents share matching survival challenges, including dirt floors, lack of footwear, and improvised cooking and sanitation setups. - [11:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4L130DkdOw&t=681s) Using visual data to see how ordinary people live dismantles national stereotypes and reveals widespread shared humanity, offering both a call to action and a reason for hope.

## Detailed walkthrough ### [00:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4L130DkdOw&t=13s) The World as a Street: Reimagining Global Living Conditions

Public perceptions of the world are overwhelmingly shaped by extreme media imagery: war, terrorism, natural disasters, refugees, and catastrophic diseases on one end, juxtaposed with vacation postcards of pristine beaches, adorable wildlife, and exotic cultural ceremonies on the other. Trying to synthesize these polarized snapshots into a coherent worldview makes the globe appear utterly alien and incomprehensible. Anna Rosling Rönnlund challenges this distorted lens, insisting that the world is far less bizarre than it seems when viewed through everyday reality. To make sense of humanity, she proposes conceptualizing the entire planet as a single long street where all seven billion people reside side by side, arranged strictly from poorest on the far left to richest on the far right. On this street, your neighbors are determined not by nationality, culture, or religion, but purely by household income.

When testing this mental model on university students in Sweden, Rosling Rönnlund discovered a profound disconnect from reality. While Swedes objectively occupy the wealthiest end of the global spectrum, Swedish students routinely place themselves squarely in the middle of the street. Explaining the fundamental misunderstanding this creates, Anna Rosling Rönnlund asks, “And how can you understand the world when you see all these scary images from the world, and you think you live in the middle, while you're actually atop?” To dismantle these misconceptions with hard visual evidence, she launched the Dollar Street project, dispatching documentary photographers to systematically capture everyday household objects across hundreds of residences worldwide.

- **Project scale at time of talk**: 264 homes visited across 50 countries (and continuing to grow). - **Standardized data set**: In every single home, photographers document a checklist of around 135 specific household items—including beds, stoves, toys, sinks, and front doors. - **Visual archive**: Approximately 40,000 cataloged images allowing direct comparisons by income level rather than geographic origin.

```mermaid flowchart LR accTitle: The Dollar Street Concept accDescr: A linear continuum mapping world households from poorest to richest by income level rather than nationality. subgraph Street["Dollar Street Continuum"] direction LR P["Poorest End\n(Left)"] --- M["Global Middle\n(~5 Billion People)"] --- R["Richest End\n(Right)"] end N1["Neighbors share income levels,"] --> Street N2["regardless of country, culture, or religion"] --> Street ```

[02:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4L130DkdOw&t=140s) Visualizing Daily Life: Front Doors, Bedrooms, and Toilets as Data

Navigating the Dollar Street platform allows users to browse families across the income continuum, showing households from Zimbabwe, India, Russia, and Mexico positioned according to their earnings. Comparing specific items across this axis produces immediate revelations. When examining front doors or beds, the reality of global living bears no resemblance to either alarmist news broadcasts or glossy interior design magazines. When Rosling Rönnlund filters the street to show the global middle class to her Swedish students and asks if those bedrooms match their own, they immediately recognize that they do not. Only when navigating to the highest income bracket—featuring bedrooms from China, the Netherlands, South Korea, France, and the United States—do the students finally feel at home.

The platform lets visitors click directly on any item to view all photos from that family's household, providing open, free access for anyone to explore or contribute images. The power of photos as empirical data becomes particularly evident when examining private spaces, including Rosling Rönnlund's favorite topic: household toilets. Anna Rosling Rönnlund jokes with the audience, “My personal favorite that everyone always tries to make me not show, I'm going to show you now, and that's toilets, because you're not really allowed to look at people's toilets, but now we can just do it, right?” While flushing, tiled bathrooms look essentially indistinguishable among affluent households in China, the Netherlands, the United States, Nepal, Ukraine, and France, pulling back to view the entire spectrum reveals vast structural differences tied directly to household income.

[05:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4L130DkdOw&t=309s) Video Snippets, Oral Hygiene, and Internal Country Inequalities

Because still photography cannot fully convey how everyday domestic routines function, the project also records short video snippets of fundamental activities such as doing laundry, washing hands, and brushing teeth. Watching oral hygiene across income brackets illustrates a precise progression. At the high end of the street, people across disparate countries use identical plastic toothbrushes in the exact same manner. Descending toward the poorer end of the street, manufactured toothbrushes disappear; people clean their teeth using wooden sticks or bare fingers. In Malawi, one photographed woman prepares her toothpaste by scraping dry mud off the wall of her house and mixing it with water before scrubbing her teeth—prompting Dollar Street to tag the image of her wall as both "wall" and "toothpaste."

This material progression defines daily life along the street: at the bottom, people rely on a stick or a finger; in the middle, households purchase toothbrushes but often share them among family members; and at the top, individuals possess their own separate toothbrushes. Beyond cross-border comparisons, Dollar Street visualizes dramatic economic divides within individual nations. In the United States, where the majority cluster in the middle of the national distribution, comparing the affluent Howard family to the low-income Hadley family exposes stark differences through simple domestic fixtures: the Hadleys keep their assortment of plastic and metal cutlery loose inside a green plastic tub, whereas the Howards store their utensils in a fitted wooden drawer with individual custom compartments. Similarly, examining three Chinese households shows completely disparate cooking stoves, proving that cooking methods are governed by purchasing power rather than national tradition. Describing this insight, Anna Rosling Rönnlund observes, “And when you see these stoves, I think it's obvious that it's a stupid thing that usually, when we think about other countries, we think they have a certain way of doing things.”

[08:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4L130DkdOw&t=480s) Smashing Stereotypes: How Income Trumps Geography

Comparing households across national boundaries reveals uncanny convergences between families that share the same income bracket. When comparing the affluent Wu family in China with the Howard family in the United States, the bedrooms and living rooms are almost impossible to tell apart: both feature matching brown leather couches and nearly identical children's play structures (which Rosling Rönnlund wryly notes were both likely manufactured in China anyway). The same phenomenon occurs at the poorest end of the spectrum when comparing a destitute home in rural China to one in Nigeria. While family portraits might reflect distinct ethnic and cultural backgrounds, their material reality is nearly identical: both live under roofs patched with grass and plastic sheeting, own the exact same makeshift seating, store grain in matching containers, prepare fish dinners, and boil their water using identical setups.

A comprehensive recap of the world's population confirms that daily life aligns with income tier rather than geography:

- **The Poorest 1 Billion**: People live in homes with bare dirt floors, possess no shoes, eat without spoons, store salt identically whether in Asia or Africa, and experience identical sanitation challenges whether living in Nigeria or Nepal. - **The Middle 5 Billion**: Households gain access to electric lighting, no longer sleep on bare ground, store salt in sealed containers, own multiple spoons and writing pens, inhabit homes with roofs that rarely leak, wear shoes, possess mobile phones, accumulate children's toys, and generate disposable consumer waste. - **The Top 1 Billion**: Daily artifacts match across continents—identical footwear in Jordan and the United States; indistinguishable rolls of toilet paper in Tanzania, Palestine, and the US; and matching wardrobes, floorings, soaps, clocks, computers, and smartphones from Vietnam to Kenya.

Reflecting on how these photographic records dismantle cultural assumptions, Anna Rosling Rönnlund concludes, “So using Dollar Street, we can use photos as data, and country stereotypes -- they simply fall apart.” Looking directly at the everyday items of ordinary families reveals that people on opposite sides of the planet share far more in common than sensationalist media narratives ever suggest.

[11:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4L130DkdOw&t=681s) A Shared Humanity, a Call to Action, and Hope

Anna Rosling Rönnlund concludes her presentation by emphasizing that when we look past misleading stereotypes and examine the reality of everyday lives around the globe, people across different cultures and continents share remarkably similar daily routines, needs, and dreams at corresponding income levels. When seen up close through real homes and personal belongings, the rest of the world is not an alien, exotic reality—in fact, it looks strikingly familiar.

Recognizing this fundamental common ground carries profound implications for how we view global development and our place within it. As Anna Rosling Rönnlund reflects in her closing words, “And that implies both a call to action and a reason for hope.” With that final message of connection and optimism, she thanks the audience to warm applause.

## Notable quotes > [08:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4L130DkdOw&t=480s) So using Dollar Street, we can use photos as data, and country stereotypes -- they simply fall apart. — Anna Rosling Rönnlund

> [00:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4L130DkdOw&t=13s) And how can you understand the world when you see all these scary images from the world, and you think you live in the middle, while you're actually atop? — Anna Rosling Rönnlund

## Mentioned Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Dollar Street, TED, Sweden, Rwanda, Latvia, Burkina Faso, Peru, Zimbabwe, India, Russia, Mexico, China, Netherlands, South Korea, France, United States, Nepal, Ukraine, Malawi, Howard family, Hadley family, Wu family, Nigeria, Jordan, Tanzania, Palestine, Vietnam, Kenya

## Video description What does it look like when someone in Sweden brushes their teeth or when someone in Rwanda makes their bed? Anna Rosling Rönnlund wants all of us to find out, so she sent photographers to 264 homes in 50 countries (and counting!) to document the stoves, bed, toilets, toys and more in households from every income bracket around the world. See how families live in Latvia or Burkina Faso or Peru as Rosling Rönnlund explains the power of data visualization to help us better understand the world.

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[Source](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4L130DkdOw)

中文简报

“美元街”调查显示家庭收入比国家文化更能决定生活形态来自50个国家的摄影证据表明，日常居住条件与生活习惯取决于购买力，而非地理或宗教。安娜·罗斯林·伦隆德（Anna Rosling Rönnlund）将全球人口构想在一条严格按家庭收入从贫到富排列的单一街道上，以此挑战被媒体扭曲的刻板印象。她依托“美元街”（Dollar Street）项目标准化的家庭照片库，将大门、厕所和牙刷等普通物品的图像作为经验数据，对比了世界各地的生活条件。该演讲展示出日常物质生活主要受购买力支配，而非地理、宗教或文化；处于地球两端、收入水平相同的家庭展现出了惊人的相似生活状态。通过用感同身受的家庭现实取代猎奇化的刻板印象，本次演讲提出了基于实证的行动呼吁，并传递了立足现实的共通人性。 “美元街”项目通过记录50个国家264户家庭的日常生活，拍摄了135种标准化家居物品的约4万张照片，以此消除对全球认知的扭曲。 (0:13) 居住条件、家居物品和日常作息主要由家庭收入决定，而非国家、文化或宗教。 (8:00) 中国和美国等单一国家内部的经济不平等，往往反映了整个全球范围的生活条件光谱。 (5:09) 在全球70亿人口中，约有50亿人处于全球中等收入阶层，其特征包括拥有电力、不漏雨的屋顶、鞋子、手机和塑料器皿。 (8:00)

Reading summary

Anna Rosling Rönnlund argues that everyday living conditions across the globe are determined primarily by household income rather than nationality or culture. Using the Dollar Street visual database, she demonstrates that families with comparable earnings share remarkably similar domestic realities regardless of geographic borders. Mapping the World by Household Income (0:13) Rosling Rönnlund challenges worldviews shaped by extreme media narratives—polarized between humanitarian catastrophes and idyllic vacations—by proposing a model where all seven billion people reside on a single street arranged from poorest to richest. When testing this framework on Swedish university students, she identified a notable cognitive disconnect: students who objectively belong to the wealthiest global tier routinely assumed they lived in the global middle. When shown middle-tier bedrooms, the students saw no resemblance to their own, recognizing their living conditions only when viewing top-bracket residences in nations such as China, France, South Korea, the Netherlands, and the United States. To correct these misperceptions with systematic evidence, Rosling Rönnlund launched the Dollar Street project. At the time of the presentation, documentary photographers had surveyed 264 homes across 50 countries, cataloging a standardized list of around 135 everyday items per household—such as front doors, beds, stoves, toys, and toilets—to compile an open visual archive of roughly 40,000 comparative photographs. Material Progressions Across Three Global Tiers (5:09) Dollar Street's visual records illustrate how basic domestic functions follow income gradients rather than national boundaries. In oral hygiene, households at the lowest income levels rely on sticks, fingers, or materials like dried wall mud mixed with water (as documented in Malawi); middle-tier families purchase toothbrushes but often share them among family members; and top-tier households maintain individual manufactured toothbrushes. This material progression mirrors the global distribution of living standards outlined by Rosling Rönnlund. The poorest one billion people live on bare dirt floors, lack shoes and spoons, and face shared sanitation challenges regardless of continent. The middle five billion gain electric lighting, shoes, leak-resistant roofs, sealed food containers, mobile phones, and disposable waste. Meanwhile, the top one billion people possess nearly identical domestic fixtures worldwide, utilizing indistinguishable flushing tiled toilets, wardrobes, electronics, and household goods across countries like Tanzania, Jordan, and the United States. Cross-Border Convergence and Domestic Inequality (8:00) The project demonstrates that purchasing power overrides cultural tradition both within nations and across borders. Within individual countries, material living conditions vary widely by income: in the United States, the lower-income Hadley family keeps utensils loose in a plastic tub, whereas the affluent Howard family uses custom partitioned wooden drawers. Similarly, three Chinese households documented on the platform rely on completely different stove types, demonstrating that domestic technology tracks wealth rather than a uniform cultural practice. Conversely, families in matching income brackets display striking material alignment regardless of geography. Comparing the affluent Wu family in China with the Howard family in the United States reveals nearly identical living rooms with matching leather couches and play equipment. At the lowest income level, a rural Chinese home and a Nigerian home share matching makeshift seating, grass-and-plastic patched roofs, grain containers, and water-boiling setups. Rosling Rönnlund asserts that using visual documentation as empirical data systematically dissolves country-based stereotypes. Rosling Rönnlund concludes that recognizing the common material patterns, routines, and needs shared across income tiers demystifies the world, describing this shared reality as both a call to action and a reason for hope in global development.

精炼阅读摘要

Anna Rosling Rönnlund 认为，公众对全球生活的认知长期受到媒体两极化影像的误导；通过将照片作为实证数据并按收入排布，可以发现决定人们日常生活物质形态的关键因素是家庭收入，而非国籍、文化或宗教。美元街概念：将全球按收入排布 (0:13) 媒体日常充斥着战争、灾害、难民等极端灾难画面，或是度假明信片般的异域风光，导致大众眼中的世界显得割裂而怪异。为了打破这种认知偏差，Anna Rosling Rönnlund 提出了“美元街”（Dollar Street）模型，将全球约70亿人口想象为居住在同一条长街上的邻居，从最左端的极贫排布到最右端的极富。在这条街上，决定谁是邻居的标准纯粹是家庭收入，而非所属国家或文化信仰。在对瑞典大学生的测试中，Rosling Rönnlund 发现这些客观上身处全球最高收入区间的学生，普遍误以为自己生活在全球正中间。这种错位使高收入人群难以准确理解世界。为此，该项目派遣纪实摄影师深入全球50个国家的264户家庭，依照约135项标准化清单拍摄床、炉灶、玩具、门和水槽等日常物品，建立起拥有约40,000张分类图像的开放数据库，使用户能直观地按收入层次横向比对真实生活。日常物件透视：私人空间中的收入梯度 (2:20) 透过前门、卧室和厕所等私密家居细节的比对，全球物质生活的实际差距得以精确显现。当 Rosling Rönnlund 向瑞典学生展示全球中等收入阶层的卧室时，学生们无法产生共鸣；只有浏览到中国、荷兰、韩国、法国和美国的高收入家庭卧室时，他们才辨认出与自己相似的生活环境。这一对比证实了许多人对自身所处全球经济位置的严重误判。厕所这一通常被回避的私密设施更直观地反映了基础设施的阶梯分布。在中国、荷兰、美国、尼泊尔、乌克兰和法国的富裕家庭中，铺设瓷砖的抽水马桶外观几乎没有区别；然而，随着收入沿着街道向下滑落，卫生设施的结构迅速分化，展示出购买力和公共基础设施对私人卫生的决定性约束。行为与国别内部分化：打破国家刻板印象 (5:09) 除了静态摄影，项目还通过洗手、洗衣和刷牙等短视频记录动态习惯。在口腔卫生方面，高收入阶层普遍使用标准塑料牙刷；中等收入家庭常购买牙刷并在家庭成员间共用；而在极贫困端，人们只能使用树枝甚至手指清洁，马拉维的一名妇女甚至需刮下自家墙面的干泥巴和水制成牙膏。该图片因此在数据库中同时被标记为“墙”和“牙膏”。这种基于收入的差异同样打破了“一个国家一种生活方式”的刻板预设。在美国本土，高收入的 Howard 家将餐具规整放置在定制分格的木抽屉中，而低收入的 Hadley 家则将塑料与金属混杂的餐具散放在绿色塑料盆里。同样，中国三户不同收入家庭的炉灶类型截然不同，表明烹饪与居住方式直接受制于购买力，而非所谓的民族传统文化。跨国生活趋同：收入阶层超越地理界限 (8:00) 跨国横向比较显示，处于相同收入梯队的家庭，其物质生活存在惊人的相似性。中国富裕的吴姓家庭与美国 Howard 家的客厅几乎无法分辨，均配有棕色皮沙发和几乎一样的儿童游乐设施。在极贫困端，中国农村极端贫困户与尼日利亚贫困家庭虽然外貌族裔各异，但生活现实高度一致：两者均住在以草和塑料布修补的屋顶下，拥有简陋坐具，使用相似器皿储粮，同样依靠简易装置烧水烹食。按照人口梯队归纳，全球最贫困的10亿人面临着无鞋可穿、泥地赤足、缺乏餐具以及亚洲与非洲如出一辙的盐罐与卫生挑战；中段的50亿人获得了电力照明、不漏雨的屋顶、密封储盐罐、多把勺子、笔、手机和玩具；最富有的10亿人则跨越国界共享着完全标准化的消费品，从约旦到美国的鞋子，到坦桑尼亚、巴勒斯坦与美国的卫生纸，再到全球通用的卫浴、钟表与智能手机均高度一致。 Rosling Rönnlund 总结指出，当利用照片作为数据穿透媒体呈现的极端偏见后，国别刻板印象便不攻自破；处于相同经济水平的人群在日常琐事、生存需求与生活愿望上具有高度共通性。她认为，这种基于日常生活经验的共同人性，既是审视全球发展的行动呼吁，也是对人类未来抱持希望的客观依据。

Source quotes

[8:00] Anna Rosling Rönnlund: So using Dollar Street, we can use photos as data, and country stereotypes -- they simply fall apart. [0:13] Anna Rosling Rönnlund: And how can you understand the world when you see all these scary images from the world, and you think you live in the middle, while you're actually atop?

Original transcript

[0:13] What images do we see from the rest of the world? [0:16] We see natural disasters, [0:19] war, terror. [0:21] We see refugees, [0:22] and we see horrible diseases. [0:24] Right? [0:25] We see beautiful beaches, [0:27] cute animals, [0:28] beautiful nature, [0:29] cultural rites and stuff. [0:32] And then we're supposed to make the connection in our head [0:35] and create a worldview out of this. [0:37] And how is that possible? [0:39] I mean, the world seems so strange. [0:42] And I don't think it is. [0:44] I don't think the world is that strange, actually. [0:47] I've got an idea. [0:48] So, imagine the world as a street, [0:52] where the poorest live on one end and the richest on the other, [0:55] and everyone in the world lives on this street. [0:58] You live there, I live there, [1:01] and the neighbors we have are the ones with the same income. [1:04] People that live in the same block as me, [1:07] they are from other countries, other cultures, other religions. [1:13] The street might look something like this. [1:15] And I was curious. [1:17] In Sweden where I live, [1:19] I've been meeting quite a lot of students. [1:22] And I wanted to know, [1:23] where would they think they belong on a street like this? [1:26] So we changed these houses into people. [1:30] This is the seven billion people that live in the world. [1:33] And just by living in Sweden, most likely you belong there, [1:37] which is the richest group. [1:39] But the students, when you ask them, [1:42] they think they are in the middle. [1:44] And how can you understand the world [1:46] when you see all these scary images from the world, [1:50] and you think you live in the middle, while you're actually atop? [1:54] Not very easy. [1:55] So I sent out photographers [1:57] to 264 homes in 50 countries -- so far, still counting -- [2:03] and in each home, the photographers take the same set of photos. [2:07] They take the bed, [2:09] the stove, [2:10] the toys [2:11] and about 135 other things. [2:14] So we have 40,000 images or something at the moment, [2:17] and it looks something like this. [2:20] Here we see, it says on the top, [2:22] "Families in the world by income," [2:24] and we have the street represented just beneath it, you can see. [2:28] And then we see some of the families we have visited. [2:31] We have the poorer to the left, the richer to the right, [2:33] and everybody else in between, as the concept says. [2:37] We can go down and see the different families we have been to so far. [2:41] Here, for instance, we have a family in Zimbabwe, [2:43] one in India, one in Russia, and one in Mexico, for instance. [2:47] So we can go around and look at the families this way. [2:49] But of course, we can choose if we want to see some certain countries [2:53] and compare them, [2:54] or regions, or if we want, to see other things. [2:56] So let's go to the front doors [2:58] and see what they look like. [3:00] Go here, and this is the world by front doors, ordered by income. [3:06] And we can see the big difference [3:08] from India, Philippines, China, Ukraine, in these examples, for instance. [3:13] What if we go into the home? [3:15] We can look at beds. [3:19] This is what beds can look like. [3:21] Doesn't look like the glossy magazines. [3:23] Doesn't look like the scary images in the media. [3:26] So remember that the students in Sweden, [3:28] they thought they were in the middle of the world income. [3:31] So let's go there. [3:33] We zoom in here by filtering the street to the middle, [3:38] like this, [3:40] and then I ask the students: [3:41] Is this what your bedroom looks like? [3:43] And they would actually not feel very at home. [3:47] So we go down and see, do they feel more at home here? [3:51] And they would say, [3:52] no, this is not what a Swedish typical bedroom looks like. [3:55] We go up here, [3:57] and suddenly, they feel sort of at home. [4:00] And we can see here in this image, [4:02] we see bedrooms in China, Netherlands, [4:05] South Korea, France and the United States, for instance. [4:09] So we can click here. [4:10] If we want to know more about the family, the home in which this bed stands, [4:15] we can just click it and go to the family, [4:18] and we can see all the images from that family. [4:21] We can go this way, too. [4:23] And of course, this is free for anyone to use. [4:25] So just go here, and please add more images, of course. [4:29] My personal favorite that everyone always tries to make me not show, [4:32] I'm going to show you now, and that's toilets, [4:35] because you're not really allowed to look at people's toilets, [4:38] but now we can just do it, right? [4:39] So here (Laughter) we have a lot of toilets. [4:42] They look pretty much as we're used to, right? [4:44] And they are in China, Netherlands, United States, Nepal and so forth, [4:48] Ukraine, France. [4:49] And they look pretty similar, right? [4:51] But remember, we are in the top. [4:54] So what about checking all the toilets? [4:59] Now it looks a bit different, doesn't it? [5:01] So this way we can visually browse through categories of imagery, [5:07] using photos as data. [5:09] But not everything works as a photo. [5:13] Sometimes it's easier to understand what people do, [5:16] so we also do video snippets of everyday activities, [5:20] such as washing hands, doing laundry, [5:22] brushing teeth, and so on. [5:24] And I'm going to show you a short snippet of tooth-brushing, [5:27] and we’re going to start at the top. [5:31] So we see people brushing their teeth. [5:35] Pretty interesting to see [5:37] the same type of plastic toothbrush is being used in all these places [5:41] in the same way, right? [5:44] Some are more serious than others -- [5:46] (Laughter) [5:47] but still, the toothbrush is there. [5:49] And then, coming down to this poorer end, [5:51] then we will see people start using sticks, [5:55] and they will sometimes use their finger to brush their teeth. [6:00] So this particular woman in Malawi, [6:02] when she brushes her teeth, [6:04] she scrapes some mud off from her wall [6:06] and she mixes it with water, and then she's brushing. [6:09] Therefore, in the Dollar Street material, [6:11] we have tagged this image [6:14] not only as her wall, which it is, [6:16] but also as her toothpaste, [6:18] because that is also what she uses it for. [6:22] So we can say, in the poorer end of the street, [6:25] you will use a stick or your finger, [6:27] you come to the middle, you will start using a toothbrush, [6:30] and then you come up to the top, [6:32] and you will start using one each. [6:34] Pretty nice, not sharing a toothbrush with your grandma. [6:37] And you can also look at some countries. [6:40] Here, we have the income distribution within the US, [6:43] most people in the middle. [6:44] We have a family we visited in the richer end, the Howards. [6:48] We can see their home here. [6:50] And we also visited a family in the poorer end, down here. [6:54] And then what we can do now is we can do instant comparisons [6:57] of things in their homes. [6:59] Let's look in their cutlery drawer. [7:01] So, observe the Hadleys: [7:03] they have all their cutlery in a green plastic box. [7:07] and they have a few different types and some of them are plastic, [7:11] while the Howards, they have this wooden drawer [7:14] with small wooden compartments in it [7:16] and a section for each type of cutlery. [7:20] We can add more families, [7:22] and we can see kitchen sinks, [7:24] or maybe living rooms. [7:27] Of course, we can do the same in other countries. [7:29] So we go to China, we pick three families. [7:33] we look at their houses, [7:35] we can look at their sofas, [7:37] we can look at their stoves. [7:38] And when you see these stoves, [7:40] I think it's obvious that it's a stupid thing [7:43] that usually, when we think about other countries, [7:46] we think they have a certain way of doing things. [7:49] But look at these stoves. [7:50] Very different, right, [7:52] because it depends on what income level you have, [7:54] how you're going to cook your food. [7:56] But the cool thing is when we start comparing across countries. [8:00] So here we have China and the US. [8:03] See the big overlap between these two. [8:06] So we picked the two homes we have already seen in these countries, [8:10] the Wus and the Howards. [8:13] Standing in their bedroom, [8:14] pretty hard to tell which one is China and which one is the US, right? [8:18] Both have brown leather sofas, [8:21] and they have similar play structures. [8:23] Most likely both are made in China, [8:24] so, I mean, that's not very strange -- [8:26] (Laughter) [8:27] but that is similar. [8:29] We can of course go down to the other end of the street, [8:32] adding Nigeria. [8:33] So let's compare two homes in China and Nigeria. [8:37] Looking at the family photos, [8:39] they do not look like they have a lot in common, do they? [8:42] But start seeing their ceiling. [8:44] They have a plastic shield and grass. [8:47] They have the same kind of sofa, [8:49] they store their grain in similar ways, [8:53] they're going to have fish for dinner, [8:55] and they're boiling their water in identical ways. [8:58] So if we would visit any of these homes, [9:01] there's a huge risk that we would say we know anything [9:05] about the specific way you do things in China or Nigeria, [9:09] while, looking at this, it's quite obvious -- [9:12] this is how you do things on this income level. [9:14] That is what you can see when you go through the imagery in Dollar Street. [9:18] So going back to the figures, [9:20] the seven billion people of the world, [9:23] now we're going to do a quick recap. [9:25] We're going to look at comparisons of things in the poorest group: [9:29] beds, [9:30] roofs, [9:32] cooking. [9:33] And observe, in all these comparisons, [9:36] their homes are chosen [9:37] so they are in completely different places of the world. [9:40] But what we see is pretty identical. [9:42] So the poorest billion cooking [9:44] would look somewhat the same in these two places; [9:47] you might not have shoes; [9:49] eating, if you don't have a spoon; [9:51] storing salt would be similar whether you're in Asia or in Africa; [9:55] and going to the toilet would be pretty much the same experience [9:58] whether you're in Nigeria or Nepal. [10:00] In the middle, we have a huge group of five billion, [10:04] but here we can see you will have electric light, most likely; [10:07] you will no longer sleep on the floor; [10:09] you will store your salt in a container; [10:12] you will have more than one spoon; [10:13] you will have more than one pen; [10:16] the ceiling is no longer leaking that much; [10:18] you will have shoes; [10:20] you might have a phone, [10:22] toys, [10:23] and produce waste. [10:24] Coming to our group up here, [10:27] similar shoes, Jordan, US. [10:30] We have sofas, fruits, hairbrushes, [10:34] bookshelves, [10:35] toilet paper in Tanzania, Palestine, [10:38] hard to distinguish [10:39] if we would sit in US, Palestine or Tanzania from this one. [10:43] Vietnam, Kenya: [10:45] wardrobes, lamps, black dogs, floors, soap, [10:50] laundry, clocks, computers, [10:53] phones, and so on, right? [10:55] So we have a lot of similarities all over the world, [10:58] and the images we see in the media, [11:01] they show us the world is a very, very strange place. [11:05] But when we look at the Dollar Street images, [11:07] they do not look like that. [11:09] So using Dollar Street, [11:11] we can use photos as data, [11:13] and country stereotypes -- [11:15] they simply fall apart. [11:18] So the person staring back at us from the other side of the world [11:21] actually looks quite a lot like you. [11:24] And that implies both a call to action [11:28] and a reason for hope. [11:30] Thank you. [11:31] (Applause)