Extreme poverty
In the last 20 years the proportion of people living in extreme poverty, worldwide, has...?
Six in ten people say it went the wrong way. It went the other way.
A guess about the world, not a measurement. This one has a right answer.
A question with a measured answer, asked of perception
This one is not an opinion, and that is what makes it worth asking. There is a recorded figure, published annually and not seriously disputed, so what is being measured here is not what people believe about the world but how well what they believe tracks what has been counted. Getting it wrong is not a failure of values. It is a gap between attention and arithmetic, and the gap is the interesting part.
The reference comes from Ipsos MORI's fieldwork for Gapminder in 2017, covering 10,024 adults across twelve countries between late July and early August. It is the widest geographic base behind any question here — most of the other published references on this site are single-country — and it is also the oldest, so it describes what people thought nearly a decade ago rather than what they would say today.
Mind the Gap: Misperceptions about the world, Ipsos 2017, fieldwork 25 Jul - 6 Aug 2017
Published figures are kept separate from this site’s own responses and weighted lightly against them, so answers measured here overtake the literature rather than being anchored by it.