permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <hemenway@jeffnet.org>]

I don't want to get too far off-topic with this but these two stats about
this world village of 100 people,
>11 would be homosexual
> 6 people would possess 59% of the entire world's wealth and all 6
>would be from the United States.

are disputable. The 11% homosexual matches that of the 1950s Kinsey report,
taken from prison populations and college students, and is a highly
controversial number. Recent surveys range anywhere from 3% to 10%
depending on how they define homosexual, and as you can imagine, people get
into very hot disputes about this (so I hope we don't here!). And the only
place I've seen the 59% number is in this compilation, which gets
circulated on the internet a lot (I've asked for the source of that
figure). The number cited by the UN, the US gov't, and a bunch of NGOs is
35%. That's from 10-year-old data, and I'll bet it's smaller now with the
rise of Asia as an economic force (Asia has the highest proportion of the
world's billionaires). Not that 35% is exactly sharing the wealth.

Just trying to give some perspective. Numbers are slippery-
Toby