Sociology Now, Census Update

scattered into millions of individual, local particles, and a great gravitational
vacuum that collects all these local, individual particles into a congealing center.
There are numerous, formerly unimaginable changes that go under the heading
of “globalization”—scientific advances, technological breakthroughs that connect
people all over the globe, the speed and integration of commercial and economic deci-
sions, the coherence of multinational political organizations and institutions—like the
recently “invented” European Union and G8 organizations, not to mention the older
and venerable organizations like the United Nations (founded in 1945) and NATO
(founded in 1950). The increased globalization of production of the world’s goods—
companies doing business in every other country—is coupled with increasingly sim-
ilar patterns of consumption as teenagers all over the world are listening to Eminem
or Britney Spears, on portable stereo equipment made in Japan, talking on cell phones
made in Finland, wearing clothing from Gap that is manufactured in Thailand, walk-
ing in Nikes or Reeboks, shopping at malls that feature the same boutiques, which
they drive to in cars made in Germany or Japan, using gasoline refined by American
or British companies from oil extracted from the Arabian peninsula.
Just as our societies are changing dramatically, bringing the world closer and
closer together, so too are those societies changing, becoming multiracial and multi-
cultural. Increasingly, in industrial societies, the old divisions between women and
men, and among various races and ethnicities, are breaking down. Women and men
are increasingly similar: Both work, and both care for children, and the traits that
were formerly associated with one sex or the other are increasingly blurred. Most of
us know that we possess both the capacity for aggression, ambition, and technical

CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY 29

No data

More than 25,000

20,000–25,000

15,000–20,000

10,000–15,000

7,000–10,000

4,000–7,000

2,000–4,000

Less than 2,000 The size of this square

represents 100 billion

U.S. dollars

GDP (Gross Domestic Product) Per Capita, 2000

in PPP (Purchasing Power Parity), U.S. Dollars

NORTH

AMERICA

WESTERN

EUROPE JAPAN AND

SOUTH KOREA

FIGURE 1.1An Alternative View of the World

Source:From United Nations Environment Programme/GRID–Arendal website, maps.grids.no. Cartogram reproduced by
permission of the authors, Vladimir Tikunov (Department of Geography, University of Moscow) and Philippe
Rekacewicz (Le Monde diplomatique, Paris).

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