Food for Thought

Published by marco on

I know I’ve seen this one before, but I got this via email and was kind of struck by some of these numbers (highlighted below).

If we could shrink the earth’s population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all the existing human ratios remaining the same, it would look something like the following*:

57 Asians
21 Europeans
14 from the Western Hemisphere, both North and South (Does this include all of Europe? I think so…)
8 Africans
52 would be female
48 would be male
70 would be nonwhite
70 would be non-Christian (a bit of a wake-up call for Bush’s base, methinks)
89 would be heterosexual
11 would be homosexual
6 people would possess 59% of the entire world’s wealth
All 6 would be from the United States
80 would live in substandard housing
70 would be unable to read
50 would suffer from malnutrition
1 would be near death;
1 would be near birth
1 would have a college education
1 would own a computer (a reminder that, relative to the world, you and everone you know is upper class)

*Since the numbers are so massively constrained, rounding errors and the law of averages will cause some interesting numbers to come out. There are rich people living outside of the US — just not a lot relative to those within the US. I can’t verify most of these statistics. If anyone sees some that are out of whack, let me know.