I watched Anna Rosling Rönnlund’s 2017 TED Talk “See how the rest of the world lives, organized by income.”

She begins with a very simple notion; the first world does not understand the rest of the globe. The pictures we see of other countries are always bad, showing us war, terror, natural disasters, refugees, diseases — the first world idea of the third world is born in these images. We view entire nations by one or two pictures we’ve seen, with no understanding of the true complexity and variation inherent in the world around us.

Rönnlund asks us to imagine the world as a street, where the poorest live on one end and the richest on the other. The houses are organized by income, meaning that all neighbors share essentially the same earnings. On this street of the world, many people in the first world think they’re in the middle, but are all truly on the rich end. While you may be nowhere near the richest person in your country, even the poorest Americans are near the center of this global economic street.

How can you understand the world when this is all you see, when you think you’re in the middle but you’re really atop?

To fix this issue, Rönnlund sent photographers to 50 countries and over 200 homes to take sets of photos detailing various household appliances, activities, and basic home setups. She compiled these all in one website, called Dollar Street, organizing them by position on this hypothetical street.

Now, one can see images of other regions of the world that are more representative of daily life, no longer only documenting disasters. By comparing income level to income level instead of region to region, one will learn that wealth is far more important to life than location.

Rönnlund’s project eliminates the idea that there’s a certain way of doing things country by country, but that quality of life entirely depends on income level. Even those with similar earnings in China and Nigeria can have almost the exact same living situations, despite how different we think those two countries are. Homes can be in completely different places of the world, but given the same economic status, consumer goods and living situations are nearly always identical.

The globe isn’t as strange as the media portrays it to be. Dollar Street can teach us a little more about ourselves and how income functions in the world.

In presenting these points, I thought Rönnlund was fairly effective. She had a consistent tone and hand motions that kept one interested but not distracted. Her posture indicated that she was not just giving a speech, but a presentation, in that it was loose, and she was willing to move around a bit. While her talk wasn’t really a performance as some other TED Talks are, it was definitely more of a presentation than a speech.

She was heavily reliant on her visuals, as the talk necessitated that the viewer could see her website in real time. Much of the presentation involved looking at the visual and only hearing the words she was saying, instead of her facing the audience with the camera focused on her. Although the visuals were essential, I think the talk could have been more effective if she had someone else maneuver the website for her. She spent the majority of the speech showing the audience her work on a laptop, thus requiring her to face her body towards the laptop, stopping her from being able to utilize any impactful physical speech techniques.  

Ultimately, Rönnlund made the most of her situation, and I believe her presentation was well worded, well communicated, and impactful.