Tuesday, July 04, 2006

5%, 25%, 50% Revisited

I had written earlier that when I think of the United States' place in the world, I like to keep 3 percentages in mind: 5%, 25%, and 50%. I have since found a couple more, so here is the updated list.

5% numbers
---
4.6% of world population (298 million of 6.5 billion)
6.2% of land on earth (9.63 of 148.94 million sq km)

25%
---
20% of world GDP ($12.3 of $60.7 trillion)
23% of world prisoners (2.09 of 9 million)
23% of world carbon emissions (5.8 of 25.2 billion tons)
25% of world oil consumption (20 of 80.1 million bbl/day)
30% of all foreign college students study in the US (583,000 of 1.9 million)

50%
---
45% of world automotive CO2 emissions
48% of world health care spending ($1.6 of $3.3 trillion)
48% of world advertising spending ($286.4 of $602.4 billion)
49% of world military defense spending ($518 billion of $1.07 trillion)
51% of the top 100 universities in the world
55% of the Nobel prizes in science from 1950-2003 (185 of 334)


And one bonus percentage:

66% of world spending on legal services

2 comments:

Audacious Epigone said...

The last stat is the scariest one!

Sorry I missed a comment you made awhile back. I calculated the correlations on my own using the data I linked to in the post. If you'd like, I'll send it to you (in excel) with the regression results and the raw data.

Fat_Knowledge said...

Buffy,

Good point on the military spending. I do agree with it. But, what I don't get is why the "small government" Republicans aren't trying to get other countries to contribute more so that the US can spend less. Instead they seem to want to make the US military stronger by having us spend more.

As for your other percentages, I agree those would be interesting. If I find them, I will add them. If you know of any, let me know.

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