Fact-checking the Village of 100

  • village-of-100.jpgA friend sent me the “Vil­lage of 100” meme a while back, and I’ve been noodling over it ever since. You know the one — it tells us to think of the world’s pop­u­la­tion as a mere vil­lage of 100 peo­ple, thus chang­ing abstract per­cent­ages into small num­bers you can relate to. And the moral of the story, so to speak, is that we (and ‘we’ in this case osten­si­bly means white, West­ern and well-off) don’t get things right. We’re eth­no­cen­tric. We inflate our impor­tance; we are unaware of the ter­ri­ble con­di­tions that much of the world lives in.

    Maybe we deserve to hear that, or maybe we don’t. But then, is the data in this bit of inter­net wis­dom factual?

    A trip off to Snopes helped me do a lit­tle fact-checking. Here’s the text of “Vil­lage of 100″ with cor­rec­tions and com­ments.

    The Vil­lage of 100

    If we could reduce the world’s pop­u­la­tion to a vil­lage of pre­cisely 100 peo­ple, with all exist­ing human ratios remain­ing the same, the demo­graph­ics would look some­thing like this:

    • 60 Asians
    • 12 Euro­peans
    • 5 US Amer­i­cans and Canadians
    • 1 Ocea­nia
    • 8 Latin Americans
    • 14 Africans

    These num­bers are right, as far as they go. But lump­ing China, Rus­sia, India, Indone­sia, the Mid­dle East and the other 40 or so coun­tries that com­prise Asia together seems a bit arti­fi­cial. It is all one con­ti­nent, but it’s made up of very dif­fer­ent coun­tries, and under what other cir­cum­stances would we ever refer to them all col­lec­tively as “Asians”?
    .

    • 49 female
    • 51 male

    Snopes says that the U.N.’s 2000 pop­u­la­tion num­bers have the pro­por­tion at 50/50.
    .

    • 82 would be non-white
    • 18 would be white

    If you do a lit­tle math, you’ll see that Vil­lage of 100 got those results by assum­ing that all Euro­peans and North Amer­i­cans were white and every­one else was non-white. Really, how lame is that? Do you want to tell African-Americans that they’re white? Or Rus­sians that they’re non-white? These num­bers are really too inac­cu­rate to stand.
    .

    • 89 are heterosexual
    • 11 are homosexual

    Those num­bers should be 98% het­ero­sex­ual, 2% homosexual.

    The Cen­ters for Dis­ease Con­trol sur­veyed over 10,000 adults in both 1992 and 2002 — both times they found that 2.3% of men and women call them­selves homo­sex­ual. (link HERE). As for that 11% num­ber the Vil­lage of 100 lists, Snopes says, “The com­mon fig­ure of ’10% of the pop­u­la­tion is homo­sex­ual’ is often bandied about, but that num­ber is derived from a mis­ap­pli­ca­tion of a Kin­sey study which was not based upon a rep­re­sen­ta­tive sam­ple of the pop­u­la­tion.”

    .

    • 33 would be Christian
    • 67 would be non-Christian

    Those num­bers are cor­rect, but con­sider the fancy foot­work it takes to try to paint Chris­tians as a minor­ity. (If you con­sider THIS CHART, you’ll see what I mean.) Sup­pose we were to report on the Vil­lage of 100 this way:

    Of the 100 peo­ple in the village:

    • 92 believe in a god or gods
    • 8 don’t or aren’t sure

    .
    Of the 92 that believe:

    • 33 are Christian
    • 21 are Islam
    • 14 are Hindu
    • 8 are theists
    • 6 are Buddhists

    And all the rest are Jew­ish, Sikh, Chi­nese and African tra­di­tional reli­gions, and other religions.

    Chris­tian­ity is the largest world reli­gion by a wide mar­gin. Hope­fully, we could know that fact and not let it make us tri­umphal­is­tic. But in any case, it’s the truth.
    .

      .

    • 5 would con­trol 32% of the entire world’s wealth, and all of them would be US citizens

    Oh please! The entire vil­lage pop­u­la­tion of US Amer­i­cans and Cana­di­ans together was only 5 peo­ple (remem­ber?), so how could there sud­denly be 5 Amer­i­cans doing any­thing?? We’d have had to annex Canada and some­how pop­u­lated it with Amer­i­cans. And then it would still mean that the entire pop­u­la­tion of Can-America was “con­trol­ling 32% of the world’s wealth” — how much of the Third World’s money have YOU taken in today?

    And you have to won­der what this phrase even means, since nei­ther ‘wealth’ nor ‘con­trol’ is defined. How is it that the “con­trollers” are some­how tak­ing, bank­ing and spend­ing money that has been made by the other non-American vil­lagers? Is the author defin­ing any Amer­i­can who owns or man­ages a busi­ness, fac­tory or large con­cern some­where else in the world as some­how tak­ing wealth from the peo­ple he/she employs to work there?

    And by the way, if we’re look­ing at how much of the world’s wealth is con­trolled by Amer­ica, shouldn’t we also be look­ing at how much of the world’s wealth is pro­duced by Amer­ica? I doubt very much that any­one in the vil­lage really wants these 5 Can-Americans to stop pro­vid­ing employ­ment, tech­nol­ogy, resources, goods and ser­vices for the other 95.
    .

    • 80 would live in sub­stan­dard housing

    Sub­stan­dard accord­ing to who — sorry, whom? My house would be con­sid­ered sub­stan­dard if I lived in Bel Air. A mud hut might be com­pletely stan­dard in a com­mu­nity full of mud huts. Snopes tried to arrive at a num­ber any­way, but the best num­ber they could ver­ify was 33%, a looonng way away from the stated 80%.
    .

    • 24 would not have electricity.

    We have a win­ner! A cou­ple energy sources listed a sim­i­lar fig­ure, so this is an accu­rate num­ber. Hooray!
    .

    • 67 would be unable to read

    Nope. In 1998, UNICEF reported the num­ber as 16%. They expected it to rise, but prob­a­bly not by 400%!
    .

    • 1 (only one) would have a col­lege education.

    And if the one were me, I’d still be think­ing of more prof­itable ways I could’ve spent those four years of my life. But any­way, Snopes explains why that num­ber prob­a­bly isn’t right either.
    .

    • 50 would be malnourished.

    The World Health Orga­ni­za­tion says that num­ber should be 33.
    .

    • 33 would be with­out access to safe water.

    THIS chart that puts it at 25.
    .

    • 1 would have HIV

    Accord­ing to the UN and WHO, (HERE), it’s 0.6%. So I’ll give them the ben­e­fit of the doubt and say they were round­ing up. But make no mis­take, they’re round­ing up by about 27 mil­lion peo­ple.
    .

    • 1 would be near death
    • 2 would be near birth

    This is so vague you can’t even check the accu­racy of it. For all I know, I’m near death (creepy, huh?). If they’re only using age as a deter­mi­nant, … well, some would say I’m still pretty near death. But the fact is that the num­ber will exclude any of the myr­iad ways that younger peo­ple die, which would make it almost mean­ing­less.
    .

    • 7 peo­ple would have access to the internet

    Accord­ing to these guys, (who are look­ing to pro­vide inter­net access world­wide, and so would be inclined to report as low a num­ber as pos­si­ble) that num­ber should be 18.

    And really, can’t we all won­der some­times if the inter­net is really that much of a bless­ing? ;-)


    Related posts:

    1. Anti­ochian Vil­lage — almost heaven, almost Pittsburgh
    2. Trav­el­ing
    3. Hollywood’s fear of con­tro­versy, cont.
    4. Off to chant and pray
    5. Yes, Vir­ginia, there is a St. Nicholas

    January 2nd, 2008 | Grace | 6 Comments |

6 Responses and Counting...

  • Anam Cara 01.02.2008

    5 would con­trol 32% of the entire world’s wealth, and all of them would be US cit­i­zens
    * 1 (only one) would have a col­lege education.

    So. accord­ing to this, 4 of the peo­ple con­trol­ling the world’s wealth do not have col­lege edu­ca­tions. I find that very inter­est­ing. Does that one per­son design all the bridges in the world? That would explain the recent col­lapse — he/she is over­worked! That same one is work­ing on find­ing cures for all the dis­eases we are study­ing? No won­der there is not a cure for can­cer yet? How in the world would any­one find time to do that while work­ing on all the civil engi­neer­ing projects?

    At least that means there should only be one lawyer. Noth­ing sad­der or less pro­duc­tive than one lawyer. Every­one knows that a com­mu­nity that can’t sup­port one lawyer can always sup­port two — they have some­one to be the oppos­ing council.

    Thanks, Grace. That pro­vided a good chuckle to start the morning!

  • Anam Cara

    Grace, don’t know how much the num­bers would change as both are smaller groups, but in the reli­gion ques­tion, Mor­mons and Jehovah’s Wit­nesses are clas­si­fied as Chris­t­ian when they are not as they deny the Trin­ity and deity of Jesus. That might drop Chris­t­ian percentage.

    I have no idea what other cults they might have lumped in with “Chris­t­ian.” But many of these groups really want to be main­stream and so claim to be Chris­t­ian when they are not. (Given the cur­rent state of lead­er­ship, one won­ders about The Epis­co­pal Church — but the faith­ful are aban­don­ing it in droves for more “lit­tle o” ortho­dox churches.

  • Grace

    1 college-educated — I never even noticed the con­tra­dic­tion with the other claims. As I said, Snopes went into more detail about why the num­ber was wrong, but by that time I was just get­ting worn out with it all.

    On the Chris­t­ian ques­tion — you know, I was just think­ing about that one this morn­ing. Because you’re right about those sects being included, and I totally hate that Adher­ents did that. Look­ing at the broken-out num­bers they’ve got at the top of the page, I should be able to get the real num­ber minus the cults. I’ll do it in a bit and present it as a follow-up post. But as you say, I sus­pect that it’s not sig­nif­i­cantly lower.

  • Alice C. Linsley

    You’ve done a ter­rrifc job of fact check­ing on this Vil­lage of 100 myth.

    There is another prob­lem with it. Vil­lages are tra­di­tion­ally set­tle­ments of peo­ple who are related by blood and mar­riage. They are homo­ge­neous in many ways and the com­mu­nity life expresses the core reli­gious beliefs of the peo­ple. In other words, vil­lages are never sec­u­lar societies.

  • Didy­oumis­s­the­p­oint?

    I’m just won­der­ing if you haven’t missed the point? It is a priv­i­lege to split hair over the numbers–isn’t it star­tling to con­sider that there is even one per­son in our world whose basic needs aren’t being met?

  • Grace

    I didn’t miss that point. But I also think that if you have to grossly exag­ger­ate the facts to build a case, then you under­stand that you put your mes­sage in jeopardy.

Leave a Reply

* Name, Email, and Comment are Required