15 Totally Random Facts That Actually Explain The World We Live In Now

Last Wednesday, Bank of America-Merrill Lynch released a brief paper titled "A Transforming World."

To demonstrate the kinds of themes it is looking at, the firm provided the following 15 random facts:

• In the next 10 days, 112,000 people in the US, Europe and Japan will reach the retirement age of 65.
• In each of the last three years, sales of adult diapers in Japan have exceeded sales of baby diapers.
• Meanwhile, 97 out of every 100 births now occur in developing countries.
• In the next 40 years, the world will run out of oil.
• Today, 768 million people across the globe lack access to clean drinking water, and 2.5 billion people have no access to proper sanitation.
• And, there are 1.6 billion overweight people in the world versus 900 million undernourished people.
• 56% of the world economy is currently being supported by official policies of zero interest rates.
• In the last 15 years, the value of prime London real estate has quadrupled; and yet today, UK interest rates are the lowest they have been in 300 years.
• In the next 10 seconds, the US national debt will have risen by $322,000.
• In 2015, the US federal government will spend $3.77 trillion (an amount larger than Germany's GDP), while 50 million people live in poverty in the United States.
• The number of US government regulations increased from 834,949 in 1997 to 1,040,940 by 2012.
• 2,000 years of civilization...and the market cap of Dr. Pepper Snapple today exceeds that of the entire corporate sector of Egypt.
• In the last 10 years, the number of industrial robots is up 72%, while the number of US manufacturing jobs is down 16%.
• In the next nine minutes, you would become a millionaire if you were given a nickel ($0.05) for every Google search.
• And by 2023, the average $1,000 laptop will be able to communicate at the speed of the human brain (and 25 years later, at the rate of the entire human race).

(Via FT Alphaville)