When I was ten I loved the Guinness Book of World
Records. For a while I carried it to school every day, so I
could enlighten my classmates on the weight of the fattest man, the
size of the largest ice cream sundae, and the top speed of the
fastest racing car.
I thought I’d outgrown such fascination long ago, but after a
few minutes with the latest
Pocket World in Figures (a subscriber’s premium from the
Economist magazine), I found myself still hooked.
Did you know that Hong Kong residents are the world’s top
newspaper readers? (They buy 706 copies per 1,000 people, while
Americans buy only 203.)
That Lebanon has the highest level of car ownership? (732 cars
per 1000 people, compared to 486 in the States.)
That South Africans are the world’s biggest beer drinkers? (Each
downs an average of 24.2 gallons a year, while his American
counterpart manages only 13.7.)
Some statistics are less surprising. The lowest life
expectancies are found in sub-Saharan Africa, in countries that
we’re used to thinking of (when we think of them at all) as
hopelessly backward: Botswana, Mozambique, Swaziland, Malawi and
Lesotho. Crudely speaking, a Botswanan woman can expect to live an
average of 35.6 years, compared to 85 years for a woman in
Japan.
Much of this disparity is surely due to infant mortality — over
20 times as high in the African country as in the Land of the
Rising Sun — so once a Botswanan reaches girlhood her prospects
are not quite so dismal. But still.
Other figures in the book confirmed my expectations, then
confounded them.
The countries that spend most on education as a percentage of
gross national product are all extremely poor: Moldova, Namibia,
Zimbabwe, Botswana and Lesotho. Well, I thought, schooling is
something you can’t eliminate entirely, so it’s bound to take a
bigger share of the smallest pies.
But then I read which countries spend proportionally the
least on education: Nigeria, Sudan, Myanmar, Indonesia and
Burkina Faso.
Now, Nigeria has a per capita GNP of $280 while Moldova’s is
$270. Because I know next to nothing about either country, I’ll
refrain from concluding that Moldovans prize education more highly
than Nigerians do. Presumably (the statistics aren’t in here)
ex-Soviet Moldova has more universities per capita than Nigeria
does, and universities cost more than elementary schools. At least
we can infer that a nation’s material wealth is not the only
determinant of its investment in learning.
Money is nevertheless interesting in and of itself, so naturally
I wanted to know who the world’s richest people are. It turns out
they are the Luxembourgers (whom it’s more fun to call the
Luxembourgeoisie), with a per capita GNP of $42,930, followed by
the Bermudans, the Swiss, the Japanese and the Norwegians.
Americans come in sixth with $33,540.
Even the Economist knows that money can’t buy
happiness, so the book includes the United Nations’ “Human
development index,” which ranks countries according to quality of
life as determined by a formula that combines statistics on
literacy, schooling and life expectancy as well as income.
The U.S. fares better by this standard, tying Australia for
third place. The most livable country of all is supposed to be
Canada, with Norway a close second. Both nice places, I’m sure,
though a little cold and empty for my taste. (Norway is the
30th-least densely populated country, and Canada ties with four
others — including Botswana — for fourth.)
There’s also a ranking of cities by quality of life, “based on
39 factors ranging from recreation to political stability.” And the
winners are … Vancouver, Zurich and Vienna. As it happens,
I’ve been to all three. They struck me as clean, orderly and
prosperous, and in the case of Vancouver, friendly. But I wouldn’t
want to live in any of them before the age of 70.
Unless of course the alternatives are the cities with the
lowest quality of life: Brazzaville and Pointe-Noire, in
the Republic of the Congo (not to be confused with the bigger and
seemingly even more wretched Democratic Republic of the Congo,
formerly known as Zaire), and Khartoum, Sudan.
As should be clear by now, this little book (at 7.87 x 3.94
inches, it’s actually a little big for most pockets) is both a
handy reference and a dependable conversation-starter.
It’s also a valuable reminder that, in spite of globalization
and the Internet, the world remains a dramatically diverse place.
The next time you’re tempted to think otherwise, remember that the
typical woman in Niger bears 8 children, while her opposite number
in Bulgaria bears 1.1. I think those mothers would agree that
boring homogenization is still at least a few years off.
