If you’re at all like me and spend some time nosing around on the Internet, you’ve probably come across a bunch of different sites that make some suppositions about what the world would look like if we could reduce it to a village of 100 people who would represent the world as it is today.
You might even find out that there are organizations that use these statistics to generate funds for the underprivileged segments of the population.
The world population has reached 7 billion people, but suppose we could make up a representative sample of the world’s people by creating a microcosmic village of just 100 people. The following is a breakdown of what that village of 100 would look like with all the existing human ratios remaining the same.
By gender, our village would include 50 males and 50 females.
Among them, 26 would be 0-14 years of age, 66 would be 15-64, and eight would be 65 and older. Whew! My demographic is a pretty meager minority!
Geographically, 60 of our citizens would be from Asia, 15 would be from Africa, 11 would be from Europe, nine would be from Latin America and the Caribbean, and only five would be from North America. Think about that: 5 percent from the U.S., Mexico and Canada!
If we were to divide them by their native tongues, we’d find that 12 would speak Chinese, five would speak Spanish, five would speak English, three would speak Arabic, three would speak Hindi, three would speak Bengali, three would speak Portuguese, two would speak Russian, two would speak Japanese, and, the most surprising to me, 62 would speak other languages! I couldn’t find any figures about how many would be bilingual or polyglottal.
In terms of religion, 33 would be Christian, 22 would be Muslim, 14 Hindu, seven Buddhist, 12 would believe in other religions, and 12 would not be religious or they wouldn’t identify themselves as being aligned with any particular faith.
Of the 100, 83 would be able to read and write and 17 would not. By gender, males would be slightly more literate than females: 88 percent of men to 79 percent of women. Only seven of the 100 would have college degrees.
Fifty-one of the 100 would be from cities, 49 percent would be rural. Eighty-seven would have access to safe drinking water, 13 would use unimproved water. Sixty-five would have improved sanitation, like indoor plumbing. Nineteen would have outdoor toilets, and 16 would have no toilets at all. Fifteen would be undernourished, one would have HIV/AIDS and one would suffer from tuberculosis. Eighty-nine would be heterosexual, and 11 would be homosexual.
Seventy-eight of the 100 would have electricity, 22 would not. Seventy-five would be cell phone users, 30 would be active Internet users, and 22 would own or share a computer. (Aren’t those interesting statistics? 75 percent of us use cell phones! Wow!)
Six of the 100 (all from the U.S.A.) would own almost 60 percent of the entire village’s wealth. Isn’t that amazing?
If you look around, you’ll find many different breakdowns of the world population. Most of them are pretty similar because the people who compile them are basically using all the same data. For the purposes of this column, I combined items from a number of sources because I thought it was interesting to break the information down a little more than some of the sources did.
I think it’s instructive to the way we view ourselves to think in terms of how the rest of the world lives. We Americans seldom think about that. We don’t worry about sanitation and safe drinking water, for instance; we just assume that our standard of living is something we deserve because we’re Americans.
Maybe we should spend some time thinking about how the rest of the world lives.
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