
This Chart Explains Every Culture In The World - ZeljkoS
http://www.businessinsider.com/inglehart-welzel-culture-map-2014-7
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ggchappell
Very interesting. A few thoughts:

(1) Variation within a country would be interesting to see as well. For
example, how big of a blob would the U.S. be on the chart?

Answering this question might be difficult. Years of red-state-blue-state talk
have suggested to Americans that philosophical variation is properly measured
by state. But that is nonsense: someone from inner-city Chicago has relatively
little in common with someone from a small town in southern Illinois, despite
the fact that they are citizens of the same state. And let's remember that it
was the voters of _California_ that approved Proposition 8 back in 2008.

But suppose you did it _right_ (somehow). That red-state-blue-state talk also
suggests that we differ a _lot_. But do we? How large would the U.S. blob be?
It's hard to say.

(2) It's nice how well the colored regions work. They had to fudge, of course:
most noticeably with the zig-zag between Poland and Malaysia, and also with
the one between Bulgaria and China.

But generally it works. I recall a TED talk about how the various countries in
Africa actually differ quite a bit: there is great variation in prosperity,
freedom, etc. And yet they cluster together pretty closely on the chart. And
the countries further to the north in Africa that are listed as being Islamic
are still all close to the "Africa" region.

[That suggests that the U.S. might actually represent a very small blob
indeed, on the scale of the whole world.]

(3) Let's suppose that it makes sense to average two countries' scores and
think of that as a point on the chart.

Which countries lie on the boundary of the convex hull? There are twelve:
Japan, Sweden, Canada, USA, Puerto Rico, El Salvador, Ghana, Morocco,
Zimbabwe, Iraq, Russia, and Taiwan. That means -- if we are to grant that this
chart is a meaningful one -- that the philosophies of every country in the
world are, in some sense, a mix of those of these twelve.

