Socio economic comparisons among humans is the method by which humans evaluate their socio-economic condition vis a vie their neighbors. This is done by measuring the difference in two or more socio economic conditions. This evaluation enables humans to make decisions about their own and their family’s future. In this way human kind of thinking also determines the future course of development. In this sort of comparison human compare themselves with their neighbors and other socio economic classes. By doing this analysis human identify the most salient categories in socio economic comparisons among other humans, explain the role of personal-level attributes in the selection of certain characteristics that are important in life, and suggest that others may choose the same path as they have chosen.
One of the many economic categories is health expenditure. This is measured by the amount of money spent on health care. The level of health expenditure for a person aged twenty-five years in developing countries like South Africa is about eleven thousand dollars per annum, this is less than half of what the average individual in the United States spend on their annual health expenditures. One possible explanation for this difference is that a large number of people in south Africa are overweight, another reason for the high level of health expenditure there.
A typical ratio of income to consumption is about two to one in the United States and in most developed countries in the west, the ratio tends to be more than two to one. In South Africa this ratio tends to be about four to one, this means that income is distributed much more evenly. This might have something to do with the differences in purchasing power. Purchasing power pertain to how much money an individual has, while purchasing power pertain to how much an individual can purchase with his or her own money.
The next area that we looked at was population growth. In South Africa, the proportion of the total population that is married is about thirty percent, compared to about forty percent in the United States and Australia. These marriage ratios tend to correlate with the land ownership rates. The top ten countries with the highest land ownership rates tend to have the lowest population growth ratios. In addition, the ratio of population growth to deaths is higher in South Africa than in Australia and the United States. These results imply that when population growth is considered as an indicator of economic development, it may be lagging behind population growth in other economically developed countries.
The next thing that we looked at was growth rates at the national level. We could look at this from two perspectives, the first being the rate at which South Africans as a whole is growing, and the second being the rate at which the best educated are growing. The former is lagging behind the latter at about a rate of about six percent per year, and this gap is likely to widen further in coming years given the continuing out-of-control inflation that is eating into household incomes. Even if the growth rate is not fast enough to keep up with other leading economies, it is probably keeping up with the expectations of the population, and this may be enough to ensure that South Africans remain the fastest growing of all the African countries that we looked at. The United States and Australia come out on the bottom of the list as far as the quality of life index is concerned.
When we looked at health indicators, we found that South Africa had one of the highest incidences of childhood cancer in the world. This followed by a low but steady incidence rate of childhood diarrhea and pneumonia, and a very high but relatively low rate of tuberculosis. With regard to HIV/AIDS, South Africa has the highest incidence rate of any African country, with about 20 percent. tuberculosis incidence is low but rising, while leukemia and other potentially fatal diseases are limited to very rare types of cancer.
AIDS is spreading across much of the tropics and affecting other parts of south and central Africa, notably Kenya and Nigeria, as well as the Gambia. As, well as these more recent additions to the disease list, an increasing number of older people in urban centers are becoming infected with M. tuberculosis, especially in places with dense populations where there are many elderly people: in Cape Town, for example. It is a problem that will likely continue to affect many other African countries in coming years given the climate and other factors that are conducive to the spread of the.
The situation in South Africa is complicated by the fact that, despite the best medical care, the disease has not been able to find its own foothold in the country. One possible reason for this could be the ethnic mixing, or the mixing of different cultures, that occurs in South Africa, causing some individuals to carry diseases they would not normally have. Another factor could be the continuing lack of hygiene that is common in the cities. This has been a major barrier to the disease, but new measures have been taken to improve this situation. Overall, however, despite the best medical care and the availability of drugs, the prevalence of tuberculosis continues to rise in South Africa.