I just got into my hotel room in Seattle. I’m in town for the Hard Liver Barleywine Festival over at Brouwer’s, though I’ll first be attending a cheese and beer tasting courtesy of Alan Shapiro’s SBS Imports, and then a whisky tasting tonight.
Anyway, I came across an interesting little factoid in a magazine I was reading on the plane. I can’t verify its accuracy or its source, but it’s interesting all the same.
The “estimated number of drunk people in the world at any given moment” is 46,948,952, or nearly 47 million. With an estimated current world population, as I write this, of 6,894,222,276 or roughly 6.9 billion, that means a mere 0.68% of the world — less than 1 percent — is inebriated at any given time. That doesn’t sound like very many drunks in the world when expressed that way, now does it?
It sounds like a very large amount to me, considering probably a billion of the world’s population is under their countries’ respective drinking ages. I would be curious to see the ratio for the US alone.
Woohoo, Seattle represent!
Ooooh, Hard Liver is FUN! And dangerous. Brouwer’s is a great place, too. Have fun! I assume you’ve been to Seattle before? If not, contact me and I can give you some other great breweries to visit, esp if I know whereabouts your hotel is.
On Sunday, I’ll be judging for the ExBeerience competition for the first time as a BJCP judge. I don’t know my BJCP ranking yet, but I’ve taken the exam so I’m at least an “apprentice.” Woohoo!
I want a shirt that says “I’m in the 0.68% right now.”
You have to remember that at any given time at leat 30% of the people in the world are asleep. Now, granted–and I can certainly attest to this–you can be asleep AND drunk at the same time, but I think it’s fair to say that the percentage of drunk people in the world should be adjusted accordingly. So maybe closer to one in nine? That seems like a pretty healthy percentage to me.
Add one more to the list of people. I do remember reading a while back (again, I don’t remember the source) that nearly 2/3 of Russian men are inebreated when they die. See, beer is much better than vodka 🙂