I’ve got some numbers for you.
There are 6.7 billion people on planet earth right now. 300 people are born every minute, 1/10 of them born to teenagers. 16 of those 300 babies will die by age 5. One of their mothers will die in childbirth, which if you work it out is 40,000 people dead a month. 1,100 people will die every ten minutes, on average, on Earth. Human life generated 2.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide per month in 2007, and we use more than 1/2 of the total fresh water on the planet while producing more than 3 tonnes of waste per person, and cleverly shoving that waste in our water supplies.
We produced $65.61 trillion worth of stuff on earth last year, 2% of which was spent on defence. Globally the average output per person is worth about 10 grand. 30% of the people on Earth who want to work can’t, because they are unemployed. Some might call this a reserve army of labour, but more of that later. Only 4% of the Earth’s population is directly engaged in agriculture, with everyone else either making stuff or selling that stuff. Only 10% of the Earth’s surface is arable land.
We trade a lot with each other, and spend a huge amount of our time digging stuff out of the ground to start productive processes.
Image via Wikipedia
We fight about land. “Stretching over 250,000 km, the world’s 322 international land boundaries separate 194 independent states and 70 dependencies, areas of special sovereignty, and other miscellaneous entities”. Ethnicity, culture, race, religion, and language have divided states into separate political entities as much as history, physical terrain, political fiat, or conquest, resulting in sometimes arbitrary and imposed boundaries. Boundary, borderland/resource, and territorial disputes vary in intensity from managed or dormant to violent or militarized; un-demarcated, indefinite, porous, and unmanaged boundaries tend to encourage illegal cross-border activities, uncontrolled migration, and confrontation. Ethnic and cultural clashes continue to be responsible for much of the territorial fragmentation and internal displacement of the estimated 6.6 million people and cross-border displacements of 8.6 million refugees around the world as of early 2006.
87% of us have the ability to read the directions on a medicine bottle, and on average humans can expect to live to be 66 years old or so, well up from 40 years ago, when the average age some one could expect to live to was only 40 across the globe. Most people have some form of education, but standards (and definitions of what it means to be educated) are very different depending on where you go.
On Earth, we produce more cars per hour than babies. But only just.
56 Million deaths occur per year, Which, per day, is 153,781, or 2 per second. Today 356,201 people were born. In the last 3 seconds, 12 people popped out. Most of those 12 people came from India, China, and Africa.
The world is a very large place, and it is sometimes a good idea to talk about issues using a large frame of reference like a country, or a trading bloc, or a planet. When we talk about the determinants of cycles of boom and bust in the economy as a whole, or talk about the inflation rate, or compare the growth of one country with another, we are using concepts best talked about in macroeconomics. We’ll begin by defining our terms, then move on to talk about economic growth on Friday.
Growth matters. You’ll see why in the lecture when I show you this.
Important concepts I’ll show you tomorrow: GDP, gross domestic product, economic growth, inflation, living standards. Read chapter 1 of Barro, the second part of the book.
