It's not a pyramid!

As posted on yourstory.in

CK Prahalad’s book ‘The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid’ firmly established our visual impression of the world’s economic landscape as a pyramid. So much so that ‘Bottom of the Pyramid’ or ‘BoP’ has become part of daily lingo. Except it’s not a pyramid. A 3D visualization of how income or wealth is distributed in most countries, including India, looks nothing like a pyramid. It looks like this:

So what’s in an image? A lot actually. There’s a reason for the saying ‘an image is worth a thousand words’. The pyramid suggests to us that the problem of poverty is a lot less dramatic than it actually is. The real picture presents a problem of far greater magnitude than we might ever have imagined. If you are seeking the fortune at the bottom, you might think that this suggests a far larger fortune – a bigger market. However, when you consider that the total amount of money in the system is controlled, it means that that as you get down towards the bottom, wealth becomes increasingly stretched thin across much larger segments of humanity. Maybe not as glinting and magnificent a fortune after all.

It's not a pyramid!

CK Prahalad’s book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid has firmly established our visual impression of how incomes are distributed as a pyramid. A strong, solid structure with the poorest at the bottom that slowly tapers, kind of holding up the apex.

In reality it looks NOTHING like a pyramid. Here’s a 3D visualization of what it looks like based on real income distributions.

Of course, if I had a lot of time on my hands I’d figure out how to plot it in 3D a lot better, maybe starting with a square shape rather than a circle so it compares better to a pyramid. But I don’t. You get the picture though. (To get more of a sense for what income distributions are like check out my earlier posts Who Cares about the Average Income and Income Distributions around the World).

Rather than put my take on the different impressions and associations you get from these pictures, I’m really curious to hear yours. What are the associations you get from this over the pyramid? I think that we need a different term to replace the ubiquitously used ‘Bottom of the Pyramid’.