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Bill Gates may be on a mission to eradicate extreme poverty, but he's not going to do it by focusing on the "developing" world anymore.
"I talk about the developed and developing world all the time, but I shouldn't," Gates wrote in a new blog post this week.
His new resolution to eradicate "developing" and "developed" from his vocabulary was spurred by the release of the book "Factfulness," written by his good friend and Swedish statistician Hans Rosling. Rosling died of pancreatic cancer last year, bit his book is out post-mortem, after his son and daughter-in-law finished the final pages for him.
Gates called it "one of the most educational books I've ever read." and said the world would be better if millions of others read it, too.
Factfulness is Rosling's final attempt to change the fatalistic ways that he says most people view the world. He wants us to know that statistically speaking, things aren't as bad as we might think. He believes we rely too much on a set of emotion-fueled "instincts" to frame the state of the world, painting a much gloomier-than-reality picture of everything from global education to healthcare and natural disasters.
One of the biggest ways he hopes to do this is by replacing the binary framework of one "developing" world pitted against another "developed" world.
Instead, he says it's more useful (and accurate) to think of world income levels in four distinct brackets. While someone living in Level 1 might use their fingers to rinse and brush their teeth each night, a person living in the Level 4 income bracket would more likely plug their electric toothbrush in for a charge when they're done sudsing up their pearly whites.
But it's not just Rosling who's changing his global income vocabulary. The World Bank now uses a similar four-tiered system to talk about income levels, too. And Gates wants to be next.
"I'm going to try to use this model moving forward," the billionaire philanthropist wrote on his blog Tuesday.
Here's how the four global income levels break down: