You may be doing better than you think you are - Gapminder - refreshing our perspective

We are doing better than we may think. The negativity bias may blur our vision of the world. Following the news may affect our vision of the world negatively. Compared to the past decade, we are doing good, on an upward trajectory.

I was reflecting on our seemingly distorted perception of the current state of the world. This seems a hard-coded human conundrum: thinking that the present is not as good as it actually is if we look at the data. This reflection was sparked from data from Gapminder. This test can be eye-opening to many individuals, including me.

Eye-opening like these pictures of families and their income per month around the world. That provides some valuable perspective we may often forget, stuck in the fog of biased thinking. I find the visuals particularly enticing: they tell a story, and that is curiosity-grabbing.

What happened to the global suicide rate in the last 20 years? How many companies in the world have a woman as top manager or CEO? In 1990, 58% of the world's population lived in low-income countries. What is the share today?

Those are some of the questions asked in this quiz by Gapminder. And the majority of us get those wrong.