We live in a world where nearly 11% of the world’s population lives on less than $2 a day. The levels of inequality we face today leave much to be desired despite the amazing advancement of humans in general. The survey below hopes to find out why. The survey should only take a few minutes to complete and would require responses from people aged 13 to 25. Please take the survey and ask your friends to also do the same. We are not asking for any personal information or contact information.

Photo by Zeyn Afuang on Unsplash

In 1971, the United Nations passed a resolution that would classify countries as Least Developed Countries. A country would get the tag based on the following criteria:

- Poverty — adjustable criterion based on GNI per capita averaged over three years. As of 2015 a country must have GNI per capita less than US $1,035 to be included on the list, and over $1,242 to graduate from it.

- Human resource weakness (based on indicators of nutrition, health, education and adult literacy).

- Economic vulnerability (based on instability of agricultural production, instability of exports of goods and services, economic importance of non-traditional activities, merchandise export concentration, handicap of economic smallness, and the percentage of population displaced by natural disasters)

Since 1971, only 5 countries have graduated from it, these being — Botswana in December 1994, Cape Verde in December 2007, Maldives in January 2011, Samoa in January 2014 and Equatorial Guinea in June 2017. As of January 2018, 47 countries are still classified as Least Developed Countries. A UN Report on trade and development showed LDC’s per capita growth slowed to 1 percent in 2016 while the Developed Nations kept their growth stable. The same report attributed this slump mainly to poor environmental factors that hindered main avenues for a majority of the countries per capita income. An old saying goes, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” Perhaps there is no will or not enough of it.

One would conclude that the underlying problem is in fact not being solved. An often ignored and undervalued catalyst for development is the mindset to do so. Many countries at some point can attribute their booming economic growth to a sudden decision by people of a generation to change their current situation and strive for something better. Botswana for example, 1 of the 5 countries (notably also the first) to graduate from the LDC categorization has had a similar campaign, theirs personified by their Zero tolerance for corruption and battle to educate their youth. 24 years past their graduation, Botswana is a beaming example to other LDC’s hoping to go down a similar path.

Photo by João Silas on Unsplash

No concrete research exists that attributes a nation’s development to their citizens’ mentality. Mentality defined by cambridge.com is a person’s particular way of thinking about things. Our aim with this survey is to take the assumptions out of the equation and prove without a doubt whether this holds true particularly in youth. A similar survey was conducted in 2014 by Patrik Sleziak and Miroslav Sabo. They went on to publish a research paper titled “Gender differences in the prevalence of specific phobias”. The paper deals with the comparison and testing group differences in the prevalence of specific phobias while also showing how social data (data from surveys or questionnaires) can be tested. This paper can be found in the sixth issue of the tenth volume of the scientific peer-reviewed journal published by the Slovak statistical and demographical society (SSDS).

I appreciate the time you took to read this. As a reminder please take the survey above and share it with as many people as possible. It will only take a few minutes to complete.