World peace is given a copious amount of lip service. During the Christmas season it seems that everyone spouts, "Peace on Earth." But are countries and individuals backing up their words with actions that honestly make a difference? They talk the talk but do they fail in walking the walk?
I would like for readers to take a moment and think about peace and the United States. Choose your own criteria to judge by. Consider the 162 most populous countries in the world. Now pick a specific number of where you believe the U.S. ranks among those countries. Keep that number in mind and we will compare with that of an international organization.
This is the seventh year that the Institute for Economics and Peace has complied their measure of the state of global peace. Each country is rated using 22 different criteria. None of the considerations are subjective. The agency states at all are qualitative and quantitative indicators from respected sources. It includes such things as homicides as well as percentage of population jailed and terrorist activity.
Overall peace in the world is not looking too good. Over the years the world is becoming less peaceful. The report shows a 5% decrease since the year 2008. For this year's report 110 countries of the 162 actually decreased their previous ranking . Only 48 countries improved. Contributing to the decrease in world peace is that many more countries in 2012 increased the military spending as a part of GDP. Another report shows that The USA supplies approximately a third of the weapons.
If you are thinking the U.S. is the most peaceful; no, the top spot goes to Iceland. That cold country is followed by Denmark, New Zealand, Austria, Switzerland, Japan, Finland, Canada, Sweden and Belgium. But neither are we at the bottom of the list. Afghanistan easily takes that award. Syria is also in the bottom three after falling 80% since 2008. Somalia and Iraq are the other countries that joins those brining up the rear.
To help you with where our country is ranked consider some of my previous writings where I state that American news media is constantly guilty of propaganda by omission. While the news service in many countries published the results, I could not find one major American media outlet that wrote about it. A couple minor ones did but even then they did not mention where the U.S. fell in the list. Their comments stayed with global change.
This year the institute took things a little bit further and calculated the cost or economic input of containing violence. They determined that in total the amount currently accounts for 11% of world's GDP. According to the report if we could reduce the violence by 50% then the savings could, "repay the debt of the developing world ($4,076bn), provide enough money for the European stability mechanism ($900bn) and fund the additional amount required to achieve the Millennium Development Goals ($60bn)"
The entire report is 106 pages. And yes I am one of those people who sat down and read the entire thing. I do not recommend that others do the same. The summary above pretty much says it all. Just know that we need to work more toward peace in the world. Individuals can have an impact like with homicides. However mostly where improvements need to be made is by governments.
Remember what rank you gave the USA. Well, the Institute for Economics and Peace put 60% of the world's countries ahead of us as more peaceful. We finished at number 99 of the 162.
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