 I'm Salvatore Bobonas and today's lecture is the global world today. Obviously, the world cannot be adequately described in one short lecture, but some basic facts about the world may not be obvious to everyone. For example, most of the world's people, about 60%, live in Asia, which is home to the first, second, fourth, sixth, eighth, and tenth-largest countries in the world by population. In fact, Asia is so big that when we discuss regions of the world, we usually divide Asia into several subregions, and each of those subregions, for example, East Asia, centered on China, and South Asia, centered on India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, each of those subregions may be larger in population than entire continents like North America or Africa. Another amazing fact is that the rich countries of the world today are those that were already rich 200, or some would say even 400 years ago. In fact, the correlation between income per capita today and income per capita in the 1820s is around 0.96, which means that more than 90% of the total variability among countries in the world today and their levels of income can be explained by differences that were already apparent in the 1820s. Another thing that many people get thrown by is the fact that a typical country in the world today, the median country in the world, has a population of around 10 million people and a GDP per capita of around $5,000. Now, to put that in perspective, Australia has 24 or 25 million people and a GDP per capita of around $50,000, so Australia would be both a large and an extremely wealthy country compared to the average country in the world. There are around 200 countries in the world, I say around because nobody can say exactly what it means to be a country. There are 193 member states of the United Nations, that's clear enough, but there are also entities that are not members of the United Nations. The biggest one is Taiwan, but there are also many others that are, it's open to interpretation to what degree they are countries. For example, the World Bank's World Development Indicators lists 214 entities as countries you can get statistics on, or the CIA World Factbook contains statistics on 257 separate entities, so it's not always clear exactly what a country is, around 200 would always be more or less correct. Most countries are relatively small and relatively poor, about half the countries of the world have a population of less than 10 million people. That's less than the population of a city, a major city like New York or Beijing, they would be large even for countries, never mind as cities. The countries of the world are also relatively poor, a typical country. The median country has a GDP per capita of $5,000 per person per year. That's not a poor country, that's a typical country. Half the countries in the world have GDP per capita less than $5,000 per year. If you wanted to think what is the absolutely typical country, what country fits the median on both, that would be Jordan in the Middle East. Jordan has about 10 million people in a GDP per capita, around $5,000. Neither big nor small, neither rich nor poor. So when you try to get your head around what is a typical country like, think something the size of Jordan, not something the size of Australia or Canada. Moreover, only about one-eighth of the world's people live in developed countries. Now by developed, I mean countries that have a GDP per capita of $20,000 per person or more. That's about South Korea's level or higher. Nearly all of these countries are in Europe, North America and the Pacific Rim of East Asia. Roughly the same number of people live in Sub-Saharan Africa and roughly the same number of countries are in Sub-Saharan Africa, as in the entire developed world. The lopsidedness of the world, the gap between rich and poor, can be seen visually in something like the map of the world's internet infrastructure. As you can see, there are, this is a map of undersea cables. As you can see, there's a dense network of cables that connect North America to Europe and there's a dense network of cables that connect North America to East Asia. There are relatively few cables across the Indian Ocean, up the Red Sea or the Persian Gulf or across the South Atlantic. Those areas are poorly connected because they're just not that rich and so there's not as much demand to connect them. In fact, if you want to get an internet signal from South America to Europe, almost certainly it will go via North America, not directly across the Atlantic to Europe. Similarly for Australia to Europe, almost certainly it will go via North America, across the US and to Europe, not overland, not via Asia to Europe because the density of connections is just so much stronger among the rich countries of North America and Europe. The dominance of rich countries can also be seen, for example, on Wikipedia. The number one language on Wikipedia is English, of course. There are more than five million articles. The second biggest language is German. Deutsch on this graphic, German has some two million articles. But it's not even, it's even more lopsided than that because the articles in English tend to be longer and better developed articles in other languages tend to be shorter and are often simply translations of the English language articles. So although rich English speaking people form a small minority in the world, I mean only one eighth of the world is in developed countries and only a fraction of that is in English speaking countries. Nonetheless, rich English speaking people create benchmarks for the entire world and what we call world society. World society is this interstitial space of people who travel regularly, who are citizens of the world, who watch global news and pay attention to global events and in this group, English is by far the dominant language. Even if people don't speak English as their first language, they speak English as their second language. The rich English speaking world is overwhelmingly the part of the world that people want to get into, that migrants want to get into. It's also the part of the world people want to go study to get their degrees. And if they can't get their degrees in English speaking countries, then they do the next best thing, which is they get an English language education in their own countries. Membership in the emerging world society, simply put, is conducted via the English language and is experienced via English language dominated mediums. The result has been an emerging world society embracing universal norms that in origin were Western Anglo American norms, but they have become universal global norms. These include human rights, rule of law and democracy. We can roughly connect these to the three major systems of the social sciences, cultural aspects of the world are the cultural aspect of world society is human rights. The economic aspect is the enforcement of contracts or rule of law and the political aspect of world society is democracy. These have become the norms of modernity and they are in origin Western norms. Resistance to these norms is defined by most Westerners and most people who are part of global society as unacceptable or abnormal. Not coincidentally, the countries that are widely regarded as scoring best on world society norms are usually the rich developed countries of Europe, North America and Australasia. For example, this is a human rights index from 2014. The US scores one notch below the top level because of the high incarceration rates in the United States. And the fact that the US is one of the few developed countries to have the death penalty. But as you can see, the countries that are highly rated are in North America, like Canada and Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and just below that top level, you know, Japan and the United States and the rest of Europe. Key takeaways, a typical country in the world has a population of around 10 million and income per capita of around $5,000 per person per year. Half the countries of the world are smaller and half the countries of the world are poorer. Only about one eighth of the world's population lives in what might reasonably called developed countries, seven eighths of the world lives in countries that simply have a lower standard of living than most people in Australia, the United States or Western Europe are used to. And finally, globally rich English speakers are only a small minority of the world's population, but they're disproportionately influential in setting global world society norms. Thank you for listening. I'm Salvatore Bobonis. You can find out more about me at SalvatoreBobonis.com, where you can also sign up for my monthly Global Asia newsletter.