Posted on 07/03/2014 5:09:24 AM PDT by blam
Christina Sterbenz
July 3, 2014
Cultures are complicated, and anyone attempting to explain or group them will struggle to avoid giving offense.
Political scientists Ronald Inglehart of the University of Michigan and Christian Welzel of Luephana University in Germany put forth their best effort by analyzing data and plotting countries on a "culture map." Their system stems from the World Values Survey (WVS), the largest"non-commercial, cross-national, time series investigation of human beliefs and values ever executed," which dates back to 1981 and includes nearly 400,000 respondents from 100 countries.
The latest chart, published several years ago, includes data from surveys conducted from 1995 to 1999, 2000 to 2004, and 2005 to 2009.
Check it out:
Inglehart World Values Map Wikimedia Commons
So what's going on in this chart?
(snip)
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
Yup, the further you are from islam... the better are your prospects of living.
Poland squeezed in among the Asians ?
What happened to Poland?
I guess Israel didn’t make the cut.
bfl
We should sent Muslims to another planet so everyone will have a better changpce of living.
What happened to Poland?.... its history. Poland has been a dismembered (prior to ww 1) and occupied (after ww 2).This would bias toward the “survival” aspect. Its national identity is very strongly tied to its religion — Traditional Roman Catholic — to bias toward “traditional” aspect.
What’s going on with it is that the ordinate axes are solely subjective criteria. In the subjective context, they are subject to the interpretation of the chart’s creator.
The first thing I noticed is that they misspelled “Marocco” and “Danmark.” Not an inducement to credibility ...
Poland has had an interesting history, being a land athwart a natural major invasion route with no natural defensible borders. It does not surprise me they are unlike their neighbors.
If they asked, "On a scale of 1 to 10, how strongly to you believe in a creator who influences events in the world?" or "On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to base an important decision on what you feel is right in God's eyes?" or "How often do you go to church?"
These would seem like objective measures of Secular-Rational Values and Traditional values. No?
Well, maybe if you were to believe the personal interpretations of each respondent. In the end, though, the answers are not ‘fact’ but interpretations and feelings.
I guess what bothers me most about the whole graph being subjective is the term “Secular-Rational” values vs. “Traditional” values as if the former were the preferable because it is rational.
To me, it seems more humanistic even though some of the questions were related to belief in God, etc.
My interpretation: Sweden is the gayest country.
They could simply say, "Measuring and categorizing culture it too difficult. We give up." I for one am glad they attempted it. I find it very interesting and being that we live in a global society where national political boundaries are having less meaning I think understanding cultural boundaries is going to be very important going forward.
I am accused by my liberal friends and relatives of being a racist and I say I am not. I am a proud "culturalist". I don't believe that any race is superior to any others but I do believe that certain cultures are superior to others.
It’s not perfect, but that’s a really interesting chart, and mostly pretty accurate.
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