State of the Village report

This is what I'm talking about when I say that I am/we are much richer and more educated than the majority of the world. When is enough enough?

If the world were a village of 1000 people:
584 would be Asians
123 would be Africans
95 would be East and West Europeans
84 Latin Americans
55 Soviets (still including for the moment Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, etc.)
52 North Americans
6 Australians and New Zealanders


The people of the village would have considerable difficulty communicating:
165 people would speak Mandarin
86 would speak English
83 Hindi/Urdu
64 Spanish
58 Russian
37 Arabic
That list accounts for the mother-tongues of only half the villagers. The other half speak (in descending order of frequency) Bengali, Portuguese, Indonesian, Japanese, German, French, and 200 other languages.



In the village there would be:
300 Christians (183 Catholics, 84 Protestants, 33 Orthodox)
175 Moslems
128 Hindus
55 Buddhists
47 Animists
210 all other religions (including atheists)



One-third (330) of the people in the village would be children. Half the children would be immunized against the preventable infectious diseases such as measles and polio.
Sixty of the thousand villagers would be over the age of 65.
Just under half of the married women would have access to and be using modern contraceptives.
Each year 28 babies would be born.
Each year 10 people would die, three of them for lack of food, one from cancer. Two of the deaths would be to babies born within the year.
One person in the village would be infected with the HIV virus; that person would most likely not yet have developed a full-blown case of AIDS.
With the 28 births and 10 deaths, the population of the village in the next year would be 1018.


In this thousand-person community, 200 people would receive three-fourths of the income; another 200 would receive only 2% of the income.


The village would have 6 acres of land per person, 6000 acres in all of which:
700 acres is cropland
1400 acres pasture
1900 acres woodland
2000 acres desert, tundra, pavement, and other wasteland.

The woodland would be declining rapidly; the wasteland increasing; the other land categories would be roughly stable. The village would allocate 83 percent of its fertilizer to 40 percent of its cropland -- that owned by the richest and best-fed 270 people. Excess fertilizer running off this land would cause pollution in lakes and wells. The remaining 60 percent of the land, with its 17 percent of the fertilizer, would produce 28 percent of the foodgrain and feed 73 percent of the people. The average grain yield on that land would be one-third the yields gotten by the richer villagers.

If the world were a village of 1000 persons, there would be five soldiers, seven teachers, one doctor. Of the village's total annual expenditures of just over $3 million per year, $181,000 would go for weapons and warfare, $159,000 for education, $132,000 for health care.

The village would have buried beneath it enough explosive power in nuclear weapons to blow itself to smithereens many times over. These weapons would be under the control of just 100 of the people. The other 900 people would be watching them with deep anxiety, wondering whether the 100 can learn to get along together, and if they do, whether they might set off the weapons anyway through inattention or technical bungling, and if they ever decide to dismantle the weapons, where in the village they will dispose of the dangerous radioactive materials of which the weapons are made.

In this 1000-person community:
800 would have substandard housing.
670 adults live in the community, and half of them would be illiterate.
500 would suffer from malnutrition.
330 would not have access to clean, safe drinking water.
240 people would not have any electricity.
Of the 76 who have electricity, most would use it only for light at night.
In the village would be 420 radios, 240 televisions, 140 telephones, and 70 computers.
(some villagers own more than one of each)
70 people would own an automobile (some of them more than one).
50 people would possess 32% of the entire village's wealth, and these would all be from the USA.
The poorest one-third of the village would receive only 3% of the income of the village.

The following is also something to ponder...
If you woke up this morning healthy, you are more blessed than the million that will not survive this week.
If you have never experienced the danger of battle, the fear and lonliness of imprisonment, the agony of torture, or the pain of starvation, you are better off than 500 million people in the world.
If you have food in the refrigerator, clothes on your back, a roof over your head and a place to sleep, you are more comfortable than 75% of the people in this world.
If you have money in the bank, in your wallet, and spare change in a dish someplace, you are among the top 8% of the world's wealthy.
If you can read this, you are more blessed than two billion people in the world who cannot read at all.

When one considers our world from such a compressed perspective, it becomes both evident and vital that education, acceptance, and compassion are essential for the progress of humankind.

(from here and here)

edit (a couple hours later): to answer the question I pose at the beginning- unfortunately for us and the rest of the world, never.