It is an astonishing image. In his post on inequality, Roser uses this graph to conclude: “The poorer countries have caught up, and world income inequality has declined.” Hans Rosling went further: “There is no gap between the West and the Rest, between developed and developing, between rich and poor,” he wrote in Factfulness; “This is not controversial. These facts are not up for discussion.” Bill Gates, who funds both Our World In Data and Gapminder, has used the graph to echo this narrative, stating “the world is no longer separated between the West and the Rest.” Steven Pinker leveraged it for the same purpose in his book Enlightenment Now, hailing a “Great Convergence”. And Duncan Green recently wrote that income inequality is no longer about a divide between nations or regions of the world, but rather between social groups within the global population as a whole.

Indeed, the graph gives the impression that all of the world’s people are basically in the same income bubble: whether you’re in Europe, Asia or the Americas, we’re all in the same hump, with a smooth, normal distribution. Clearly globalization has abolished that old colonial divide between North and South, and has worked nicely in favour of the majority of the world’s population. Right?

Well, not quite. In fact, this impression is exactly the opposite of what is actually happening in the world.

There are a few things about this graph that we need to keep in mind:

First of all, the x axis is laid out on a logarithmic scale. This has the effect of cramming the incomes of the rich into the same visual space as the incomes of the poor. If laid out on a linear scale, we would see that in reality the bulk of the world’s population is pressed way over to the left, while a long tail of rich people whips out to the right, with people in the global North capturing virtually all of the income above $30 per day. It’s a very different picture indeed.

Second, the income figures are adjusted for PPP. Comparing the incomes of rich people and poor people in PPP terms is problematic because PPP is known to overstate the purchasing power of the poor vis-a-vis the rich (basically because the poor consume a range of goods that are under-represented in PPP calculations, as economists like Ha-Joon Chang and Sanjay Reddy have pointed out). This approach may work for measuring something like poverty, or access to consumption, but it doesn’t make sense to use it for assessing the distribution of income generated by the global economy each year. For this, we need to use constant dollars.

Third, the countries in the graph are grouped by world region: Europe, Asia and the Pacific, North and South America, Africa. The problem with this grouping is that it tells us nothing about “North and South”. Global North countries like Australia, New Zealand and Japan are included in Asia and Pacific, while the Americas include the US and Canada right alongside Haiti and Belize. If we want to know whether the North-South divide still exists, we need a grouping that will actually serve that end.

So what happens if we look at the data differently? Divide the world’s countries between global South and global North, use constant dollars instead of PPP, and set it out on a linear axis rather than a logarithmic one. Here’s what it looks like. The circle sizes represent population, and the x axis is average income (graphics developed by Huzaifa Zoomkawala; click through for more detail):