I talk about how we create societal narratives in most of my courses. These are stories we tell ourselves as a society about how we think things work. These narratives often have more to do with backing up other beliefs we have than with what is really going on. The problem is that these societal narratives impact what we do as well as how we think.

One of those societal narratives is on the nature of global stratification. One such narrative is the idea that we have poor countries and rich countries. The reality is that we have cut global poverty by an enormous amount. In 1980, 40% of the world lived on less that $2 per day. Today only 10% do.

We cover this in Introduction to Sociology using the Gapminder website. This is a great place to look at all sorts of data that tells us how things really are. The data tools on this site are extraordinary and I recommend that you play with them even when you are not in class.

I just finished Factfulness – the book that expands on this by talking about how we make myths and why and what the data is that was written by the same team (the Roslings). It is a really easy read! I know – you don’t think about books on social data as easy reads. Even though I have studied these issues (ideas, poverty, societal narratives) for a long time, I got a lot out of the book.

So – if you want to know more about what the world looks like in terms of stratification – get this book!