Visiting Dollar Street

Have you played on Dollar Street?  It’s a website that imagines the world living on a single street, with poverty on one end of the block and wealth on the other end.  You can peek into the houses of the hundreds of people who currently live on the street.

Fair warning: you will go down a rabbit hole looking at other people’s pictures.  Things like power outlets and showers suddenly become fascinating as you move from house to house (which is technically sometimes country by country).  You learn a little bit about the family itself, their jobs, how they feel about their possessions or their home, their plans for the future.

It was created by Anna Rosling Rönnlund who was trying to crunch data and present it in ways that were understandable.  “Carefully selecting data to present it in colorful and moving charts made overall global trends and patterns easier to understand. But it did not make everyday life on different income levels understandable. Especially not in places far from home.”

She also explains how the monthly income numbers were calculated and converted into dollars for easy comparison.

The homes of people on one end of the block look nothing like the homes of people on the other end of the block, though it’s comforting to see that while water situations change drastically, dish soap is dish soap is dish soap wherever you go in the world.