>Or not, as the case may be:
All I got from that, my honey, was that something based on statistics is bound to become out-of-date.
Substitute "utterly inaccurate from the get-go" for "become out-of-date" and you're getting nearer the mark. For example:6 people would possess 59% of the entire world's wealth, and all 6 would be from the United States.
"This claim demontrates the precariousness of trying to summarize a very large, diverse population in a few simple statistics. For starters, our miniature world of 100 people only includes 5 people from all of North America, so any statement involving 6 people from the United States just doesn't compute!
"Wealth" is a concept difficult to measure with any precision, but we can use Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a reasonable approximation. If we take some figures from the CIA's World Factbook 2000, we find that the estimated GDP of the United States in 1999 was $9.255 trillion, out of a world total of $40.7 trillion. In other words, in 1999 the United States possessed about 23% of the world's wealth. If we assume that all 5 North Americans in our miniature world are from the United States, and that they have inherited an amount of wealth proportional to that held by the United States in the "real" world, together they'd still have only 23% of the world's wealth, not 59%. Even if you could find some combination of 6 people in our putative population of 100 who held 59% of the total wealth, they wouldn't all be from the United States. "
The piece, typical half-baked schmalzy internet crap that it is, clings ferociously to the age old tenet: "Never let the facts get in the way of a good story."
