They prefer stories of extreme poverty and billionaires to stories about the vast majority of people slowly dragging themselves toward better lives.
They set up their narratives as conflicts between two opposing people, views, or groups. Dividing the world into two distinct sides is simple and intuitive, and also dramatic because it implies conflict, and we do it without thinking, all the time. So why is the misconception of a gap between the rich and the poor so hard to change? I think this is because human beings have a strong dramatic instinct toward binary thinking, a basic urge to divide things into two distinct groups, with nothing but an empty gap in between. The UN and most other global organizations have still not made this change. It took the World Bank 17 years and 14 more of my lectures before it finally announced publicly that it was dropping the terms “developing” and “developed” and would from now on divide the world into four income groups. I told them the labels “developing” and “developed” were no longer valid and I swallowed my sword. The first time I lectured to the staff of the World Bank was in 1999. “The Gap Instinct The gap instinct is very strong.
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