- Of all the telephone-calling minutes placed in the world last year, only 2% were cross-border calls. As Ghemawat shares in his talk, if you add in calls made online, the percentage boosts up to 6% or 7%. Still, when 400 readers of the Harvard Business Review were asked to guess the percentage in 2011, they estimated a much higher 30%. [HBR Blog]
- In France, where tensions run high over immigration, people guesstimate that immigrants make up 24% of the population. But the real figure is actually 8%, says Ghemawat in his talk. He believes that knowing the real breakdown might help ease a lot of fears.
. - Meanwhile, Americans greatly overestimate the percent of the federal budget that is devoted to foreign aid. In a study published last year, the median estimate was 25% percent, with survey respondents saying that 10% would be an “appropriate” amount. However, in reality, just 1% of the U.S. federal budget goes to foreign aid. [WorldPublicOpinion.org]
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