What is really going on in the world?

Living in prosperous Australia, many people don’t have to look far to see people who appear to be doing much better, financially, than themselves. From one perspective, even many in white collar jobs, or with their own blue collar businesses, can feel as though there are many higher earners, and keeping up with the Jones’ is an expensive endeavour indeed. Getting a global perspective, however, can be extremely eye-opening, and can be a life-changer for many. People suddenly realise they have it far better than they may have previously thought, and have much to offer others, both local to themselves and around the world.

The recent video “If the World Were 100 People”, produced by Good Media, has gone viral on Facebook, and has been viewed over 50 million times. This stylish animation works by giving its audience easy to digest statistics, by presenting a picture of our reality, if the global population was scaled down to just 100 people.

To begin with, Australian viewers might appreciate the relative population sparseness in the country when they realise not even one percent of people live here, whereas sixty percent of people make their homes in Asia. As the video progresses, more surprises appear. While Australians have had near total literacy for quite some time, a whole 14% of people world wide cannot read or write. Also around that number of people do not have access to clean water and make under a mere $2 a day, while only 1% of  people in the world make more than $90 per day. According to ABS figures, the average Australian is within that top 1%, with an average wage of over $1000 per week, with full-time earnings being even higher.

So, what effect does all this information have on us? That is for each of us to decide, but it is possible to use this information as a channel for understanding our relative privilege. It can be seen as an encouragement to spend more time volunteering our time for causes that are important to us, and possibly putting more money where our hearts are too.