If there were 100 people in the world?

(A version of this story appeared on September 6, 2023 on The Heart Of The Matter. )

When I was a young kid, I was small for my age. We’d line up at the start of the year, smallest to the tallest, and I would always be one of the shortest boys in my class. I wasn’t the smartest either, I had to work hard for my grades. Every ‘A’ felt like I had run a grueling marathon to earn it.

On top of that, I would compete against my bigger, stronger brothers and always seemed to get my butt whooped. I write this to say that I didn’t feel special or lucky. When I was successful in school or sports, I would inevitably downplay my wins, assuming the test was easy or the challenge lighter than in past years. 

My feeling of being just average persisted for a long time. I was curious about others, but I didn’t have great perspective. It took going off to college for me to see how fortunate I was. I walked in one day to my Economics 101 class and the prof started talking about how fortunate we were to be sitting in his classroom and to have the “luxuries” that we took for granted. He broke the world down into 100 people and called us some of the lucky ones. 

Getting to the heart of the issue

We were supposed to be talking about some abstract economics concept that was going to be on the next test, but none of my classmates nor I were going to remind him. I was curious about this new topic and found it fascinating. With a few simple numbers, he showed that I was luckier than I ever could have imagined. 

Here’s what I mean. 

The 100 People Foundation, regularly uses World Factbook data to break the world into smaller more easily digestible numbers. If the world were a village of 100 people, of course, there would be an equal number of men and women. The majority of the people, 66 to be exact, would be between 15-64 years old, 25 would be between infant and 14 years of age, and 9 would be 65 and older. 

From a geographic standpoint, 61 villagers would be Asian (of that, 20 would be Chinese and 17 would be Indian), 14 would be African, 11 would be European, 9 would be Latin or South American, 5 would be North American. As far as languages go, the largest number, 12, would speak Chinese, with 6 speaking Spanish, and five English. 

One of the lucky ones

But here’s where it gets interesting. Less than 7 percent of the people would have their own home, eat full meals and drink clean water, have a mobile phone, surf the internet, and have gone to college. Yes, the devil is in the details. Let that sink in, less than 7 percent. Um, I get annoyed when the wifi goes down for a minute, 93% don’t have the Internet or a mobile phone? Really? 

Of the 100, close to 80 people would have a place to shelter them from the wind and the rain, but 22 would not. Can you imagine, no shelter? Nothing substantial to save them from Mother Nature’s slights including storms, hurricanes, fires. Eleven of the 100 would be undernourished and 1 would die of starvation. Of the 100, 86 would be able to read and write; 14 would not, with only 7 having a college degree. 

I can’t speak for the rest of my Econ class, but when I started to view wins and losses from a different lens, I started to see how fortunate I’ve been in my life. 

What about you? How fortunate do you feel when you look at your life from this perspective?