A 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”?
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• 49 female
• 51 male

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

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• 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

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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.
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• 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.
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• 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%.
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• 24 would not have electricity.

We have a winner! A couple energy sources listed a similar figure, so this is an accurate number. Hooray!
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• 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%!
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• 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.
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• 50 would be malnourished.

The World Health Organization says that number should be 33.
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• 33 would be without access to safe water.

THIS chart that puts it at 25.
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• 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.
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• 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.
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• 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? ;-)