Gallups World Poll: The Great Global Dream

This is a report from Jim Clifton, CEO of Gallup. Highly revealing and underscoring the importance of life conditions. Worldwide. Gallup did not speculate about these patterns but created a world poll. The big discovery Jim is describing isnt a surprise for me.

The whole poll is a big evidence for the truth of spiral insights into the global memetic patterns and how closely personal dreams reflect it.

Global Migration Patterns and Job Creation

 by Jim Clifton
Chairman and CEO of Gallup
More and more often, global leaders are asking us the same simple, yet colossal, question: "Does anyone know for sure what the world is thinking?"

There is a great deal of classic economic data that records an infinite amount of human transactions, from GDP to unemployment to birth and death rates, that indicate what man and woman are doing, but there is no ongoing, infinite, systematic account of what man and woman are thinking.


Global leaders are right to wonder. To know what the whole world is thinking -- not just what people in their own countries are thinking -- on almost all issues all the time would certainly make their jobs a lot easier at the very least. At most, knowing what the world is thinking would create newfound precision in world leadership. Leaders wouldn't make mistakes and miss opportunities because they misjudge the hearts and minds of their constituencies and the other 6 billion with whom those constituencies interact.

We think we have found a very good answer to that very good question. We created a new body of behavioral economic data for world leaders that represents the opinion of all 6 billion inhabitants, reported by country and almost all demographics and sociographics imaginable.

We call it the World Poll. We've committed to doing it for 100 years.

The World Poll

We knew going in it was a monumental challenge, but creating the World Poll was even harder than we thought. To start, Gallup scientists combed the best public opinion archives, academic institutions, the United Nations, the World Bank, the European Union archives, the State Department, everything and everywhere we thought we might find existing information of this type.

We couldn't find it. There was no world poll. So we made one.

We knew the whole project hung on the questionnaire. It needed to cover almost every issue in the world, be translated accurately into dozens of languages, and be meaningful in every culture. Even more difficult was engineering consistent sampling frames in more than 100 countries from Ecuador to Rwanda, Iran, Russia, Afghanistan, Ireland, Cuba, Lebanon, Kazakhstan, Venezuela, Honduras, China . . . You get the picture.

Having constructed the questionnaire, our team of experts found its next biggest challenge was choosing a methodology to ensure consistent data collection so the whole set is comparable. For instance, when we ask about life satisfaction, everyone from a Manhattan socialite to a Masai mother has to be asked the same question every time in the same way with the same meaning and in their own languages so the answers could be statistically comparable. If the meaning of the questions isn't identical from language to language, culture to culture, year to year, the data are useless.

Furthermore, we needed to create the first-ever reliable and consistent benchmarks so leaders can see the trends and patterns. So we benchmarked well-being, war and peace, law and order, hopes and dreams, healthcare, suffering and striving, personal economics, poverty, environmental issues, workplaces, and on and on.

We have now completed the design, engineering, and first year of global data collection. The first-ever world poll on almost everything is done.

Then our Gallup scientists, affiliated academics, and colleagues from around the world who helped us make the poll got busy. They counted and sorted and used every known statistical technique to analyze exactly what the world is thinking. The conclusions are complex. This may be the great understatement in Gallup's history, but it's true.

For instance, when you dig deeply into the hopes, fears, motivations, and satisfactions of 1 billion Muslims, the more you learn, the more you realize how little the world knows, how wrong people are, and how much more complicated Muslim attitudes and opinions are than conventional wisdom would lead us to believe. Western leaders tell us religion drives Muslims to war. But Muslim extremists tell the World Poll that their anger is not about religion, it's about politics.

It's the same with the 3 billion people who live on $2 a day or less -- the hungry half of the world's population. What they're thinking is very different from what most government agencies and NGOs understand and report. While we're rushing them food and medicine, most of them feel the only real solution is jobs.

Another example: One of the most important questions in the world is "What do Muslim women want?" Discovering what Muslim women want has been as big a surprise to us as anything we have ever seen. Muslim women want all the freedoms that their counterparts in the Western world have -- they want the right to vote, to have the same rights that men do, and to hold leadership positions in government. The big surprise is that most Muslim men think Muslim women should have these too. And because women are half of the population, it's difficult to win in the new world unless they, their hopes and dreams, and their talents are integrated into the leadership of every organization, economy, and government in the world.

And those are just three demographics. Christians, Jews, Buddhists, old people, young people, black people, white people, communists, capitalists, Easterners, Westerners . . . These data are overwhelming because, while they offer answers to many questions that could never be answered before, they make us intensely aware of how little we know about what is in the hearts and minds of 6 billion people.


The great global goal

Gallup is committed to conducting the World Poll for 100 years, but we may have already found the single most searing, clarifying, helpful, world-altering fact. If used appropriately, it may change how every leader runs his or her country. But at the very least, it needs to be considered in every policy, every law, and every social initiative. All leaders -- policy and law makers, presidents and prime ministers, parents, judges, priests, pastors, imams, teachers, managers, and CEOs -- need to consider it every day in everything they do.

What the whole world wants is a good job.


That is one of the single biggest discoveries Gallup has ever made.

read more..