Monday, December 17, 2007

An interesting perspective on world population

If we could shrink the earth's population to a village of precisely100 people, with all the existing human ratios remaining the same, it would look something like the following. There would be:


57 Asians
21 Europeans
14 from the Western Hemisphere, both North and South America
8 Africans

52 would be female
48 would be male

70 would be nonwhite
30 would be white

70 would be non-Christian
30 would be Christian

89 would be heterosexual
11 would be homosexual

6 people would possess 59% of the entire world's wealth and 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 (ready to deliver)
1 (yes, only 1) would have a college education
1 would own a computer

"When one considers our world from such a compressed perspective, the need for both acceptance, understanding and education becomes glaringly apparent."


Philip M Harter, MD, FACEP
Stanford University, School of Medicine

2 comments:

mike said...

I'm not sure where you got those figures from but the 10% homosexuality figure is wildly inflated.

You may want to check out some figures here

Joey said...

The figures were compiled by a professor at Standford University. My guess is that the numbers are rough - to actually condense these numbers you have to estimate. Second, you have to differentiate between the amount of openly homosexual persons and the amount that are latent.

Either way, it doesn't take away from the purpose of the list - to show how unevenly spread the wealth and education are based on race and location. It's striking and somewhat disturbing. Even if the information about homosexuality is wrong, or were never even added, the list would still speak loudly.

Hi, Mike. I'm Joey. I used to be an intern at (formerly) BayWest.