You're ignoring most of the world
Which countries get attention, by the numbers
Of all the resources in the world, there’s a case to be made that attention is the most valuable. No one buys from a business they don’t know exists. No one protests their government about a cause they’ve never heard of. Attention is the prerequisite to action.
Like any valuable resource, one should want attention to be distributed relatively equitably. Unfortunately, that is anything but the case.
Even though a large majority of the world’s population lives in the Global South, in all likelihood these people occupy just a corner of your brain. People from countries like the US and France mingle comfortably in your brain’s chandelier-lit ballroom. People from countries like India and Ethiopia cram into a dimly-lit back room.
I ran the numbers to prove it. Relative to the size of their populations, the New York Times covers developed countries 25 times as much as developing countries. Wikipedia grants them 10 times more attention per person. The same pattern plays out for who you’re likely to meet. Compared to their populations, Italy gets 1400 times more visitors than Bangladesh, and Italians are also 50 times more likely to travel to the US.
Of your thousands and thousands of thoughts per day, the Global South might be lucky to catch a few. For most people in countries like the US, our worldviews are missing most of the world.
Who are the most and least overlooked countries?
Which countries get the least attention relative to their size? Or in other words, which countries should you be thinking about a lot more?
No single metric is a perfect proxy for attention, but as you can see below, I analyzed several: how much countries are covered in the media, attention via Wikipedia and Google, and how much people physically cross paths. Then, I compared these numbers to the size of countries’ populations.
Across these metrics, Bangladesh generally comes out as the country that is most overlooked, closely followed by the DR Congo and Nigeria.
It kind of makes sense. When’s the last time you read an article about Bangladesh or watched a movie set there? I would be very surprised if you’ve ever travelled there. But Bangladesh is a huge country! There are 169 million Bangladeshis, two Bangladeshis for every German.
Other countries are dramatically overlooked, too—including India and China. Yes, the two countries get a lot of attention relative to the average country. But India and China account for one-in-three humans, and they’re not getting anywhere near one-third the attention.
Of the biggest countries, Indonesians and Ethiopians also get little attentional weight, while countries like Chad (more populous than the Netherlands), Malawi (twice the size of Greece), and Madagascar (three times as many people as Sweden) are also stuffed into the recesses of our brains.
And which countries do we spend too much time thinking about? Sorry Europe, but you’re doing a real manspread in our brains over here. Of the big European countries, France, the UK, and Italy get the most attention relative to the size of their population, while the effect is even more extreme for smaller countries like Portugal and Ireland.
Now, I know that there are legitimate questions about how one should allocate attention, and whether my approach here is too simplistic. I promise I’ll get to those, but first let’s look at the numbers.
(A note: I explain my methodology for the charts and statistics in the footnotes all the way at the bottom of this post. I made sure to run some quality control and I’m confident the numbers are in the right ballpark, but you should take them with a grain of salt—you are reading a Substack with a regular dog pic section, not an academic journal.)
Who is the media showing us?
The media is the most traditional arbiter of attention, and no outlet quite captures media priorities like The New York Times. So, when I wanted to see who the media covers and who it doesn’t—without taking on an insane amount of data—I decided to look at how many NYT articles mentioned each country in 2025.1 (I imagine other major media outlets would produce similar results, though not identical.)
What do the numbers show us? The New York Times covers developed countries dramatically more than developing countries. This chart compares how many New York Times articles cover countries in comparison to their populations. (It only shows countries with more than 50 million people.) And indeed, the bars for many lower-income countries are functionally invisible—much like their citizens are to readers of The New York Times.
The ratios are staggering. Overall, when adjusting for population, The New York Times covers developed countries 25 times more than developing countries. This quite clearly skews our understanding of the world.
Imagine you’re in a stadium on a sweltering day, looking up at the stands. Your eyes scroll past an expanse of 25 rows of sweat-drenched fans, before eventually noticing a (presumably air-conditioned) glass box at the top. Imagine a journalist were covering fans’ experience of the game, and they decided to interview two sources: one from those box seats and one from the 25 rows below. It’s very apparent why this would not produce a representative story. But that’s essentially how the media covers the world.
Facile justifications don’t explain the disparities in coverage between richer and poorer countries. It makes sense that an American paper would cover the US much more than other countries, but why should this extend to developed countries more broadly? And it’s not geographical, either. Mexico is twice as populous as Italy and much closer to the US. But guess who gets more coverage in the NYT?
Developing countries are hidden on Wikipedia, too
Wikipedia serves as a fairly good proxy for the amount of information out there about different countries. As it turns out, however much we might think all people have equal worth, we know much more about some groups of people than others.
When you look at how many English-language Wikipedia articles mention each country, developed countries show up far more than developing ones.2 Among countries with more than 50 million people, developed countries are mentioned in nearly 10 times as many Wikipedia articles as their population would suggest. Just look at the chart: high-income countries are shown in green.
Here, too, this goes well beyond a fair reflection of influence and importance. Wikipedia allows us to learn extensively about even small towns in rich countries. Williamston, Michigan, a town of 4,000 people near where I grew up, has a 2,200 word Wikipedia page. But when it comes to Agbon, Benin—the 4,000 person community I lived in for two years—it has no page. The neighboring 20,000+ person town of Gouka has just a 50 word page.
Which countries are we googling?
Let’s put the ball a bit more in our court. New York Times coverage and Wikipedia entries are about what we are shown, but what about what we are seeking out? If normal people had a more holistic view of the world, we’d see them searching for countries on Google at rates closer to those countries’ populations. On the other hand, if most people have a blinkered view of the world that weights people in rich countries far more than people in poor ones, we wouldn’t.
As it turns out, the masses, too, have their eyes on rich countries. While Google search results give developing countries greater attention than Wikipedia and The New York Times, rich countries still take up much more space in Google users’ minds than their share of the global population.3
As you can see in the chart below, India gets significant attention, ranking number one in search interest. But that search interest still isn’t proportionate to the size of its population, and just look at the disparity in search interest between 260 million-person Pakistan and 80 million-person Germany. (Countries are listed in the below chart in order of their population.)
Still, it makes some sense that Google users distribute attention somewhat more evenly than other indicators of attention. You do of course need internet to be able to google, and that rules out some people in poor countries. But you also have plenty of Indians, Brazilians, and the like who are on Google, and they are more interested in their own countries than Global North-based New York Times and Wikipedia. (The fact that Google is blocked in China likely explains China’s low search interest.)
But the above chart shows who Google users worldwide are thinking about. Who are Americans thinking about? Alas, Americans’ attention is far more weighted towards rich countries. For example, Americans google Japan more than India and China, even though each has 10 times as many people as Japan.
Who are we seeing with our own eyes?
All the data I’ve presented so far has been about information we’re getting from a distance: whether we are devoting our attention to a New York Times article about a country, or if we are thinking about a country enough to Google it. But what about the places and people we see directly? The best way for something to get your attention is for it to come right into your line of sight.
Unfortunately, the places and people we see are anything but random. People from rich countries are simply much more likely to end up physically proximate to us.
This works in two directions: first, where we go. If you’re leaving your country to experience the world, there’s a pretty good chance you’re going to explore the rich world.
This chart looks at the ratio between the number of visitors countries receive and their population.4 This ratio largely follows’ countries income levels. Even relatively safe, beautiful Philippines gets one-sixth as many visitors as South Korea, a country with less than half as many people.
What about the other direction of travel—people who come to us? Before Trump, immigrants to the US actually provided a fairly representative sample of the world. Even relative to their share of the global population, the US got slightly more immigrants from developing countries than high-income countries.5 (Though immigration rates are far higher for upper-middle-income countries than lower-middle-income and low-income countries, with the UMIC figures pulled up by Mexico.)
Put together, this makes a lot of sense: people from developing countries have more of an incentive to move to the US than people from developed countries, but their path to a visa is harder and they are less likely to have the means to finance their immigration.
And they are even less likely to get the money or the visa to come to the US just for a visit. When it comes to people traveling to the US, we are dramatically more likely to come into contact with people from rich countries. A person in a high-income country is 10 times more likely to visit the US than someone from a developing country.6 For people from low-income countries, they are 200 times less likely to visit the US than someone from a high-income country.
How should we direct our attention?
To be clear, a rigid one-to-one relationship between attention and population wouldn’t make much sense. On an individual level, it’s ok (indeed, encouraged!) to pay more attention to your family than other people’s families.
And even on an aggregate level, some people and places deserve more attention. The New York Times should cover Israel and Sudan—countries actively at war—more than less eventful Austria and Algeria. Some of France’s disproportionate attention compared to China surely comes from its much better soccer teams. I understand why Aruba gets more tourists than North Macedonia.
And it is just objectively the case that the UK and France have a greater impact on the world than equally populated Tanzania and Myanmar. The UK and France are former colonial powers who now wield UN Security Council vetoes. Understanding the world requires allowing them to take up a larger share of your brain than their share of world’s population.
But where attentional inequalities become a problem is when they reinforce real world inequalities. Attention determines whose needs we prioritize, whose ideas we value, and which opportunities we take.
When Nigeria never enters our minds, it means we aren’t thinking about what we could do to make life fairer for 230 million people who, right now, tend to face daily hardships we can scarcely imagine. And misdirected attention doesn’t just hurt them—it also hurts us. It means we aren’t thinking about how to build pandemic surveillance systems and responses to climate change that protect Nigerians and Americans alike. It means we’re missing out on business opportunities and catchy songs that would make our lives more prosperous and more fun.
One doesn’t have to think that we should pay as much attention to Egypt as Germany to think that the gap should be a whole lot smaller. This won’t happen without some effort: following inertia will ensure people from richer countries remain far more likely to end up in your consciousness than people from poor countries. The media we consume is skewed towards rich countries, information about them is more easily accessible, and the people we meet are much more likely to come from rich countries.
Despite the challenges, starting to extend your worldview to the world is entirely within reach. Train your brain to remember that your daily experiences are highly unrepresentative of the world, and help make those experiences a bit more balanced.
Read publications that focus on the Global South, like the new magazine Equator (or this friendly neighborhood Substack). Go watch some Bollywood or Nollywood. Or maybe you could even take your next trip to Sri Lanka or Ghana. That doesn’t look so bad, does it?
https://timhirschelburns.substack.com/p/youre-ignoring-most-of-the-world