From PISA, some gaps more equal than others

A few leftover observations from the 2012 PISA results that I haven't seen widely remarked upon elsewhere follow.

- Excluding DC's affluent white minority, according to NAEP testing results, Massachusetts boasts the most intelligent kids in the United States. That holds among states' entire public student body and also for states' non-Hispanic white student populations. It's the best we have to offer.

As a whole, in mathematics the Bay State comes in tied with Germany and beats Austria, Australia, Ireland, Slovenia, Denmark, New Zealand, the Czech Republic, France, the UK, Iceland, Latvia, Luxembourg, Norway, Portugal, Italy, Spain, Russia, Lithuania, Sweden, Hungary, Croatia, Greece, and Serbia among the  participating members of the Occidental club. It comes in behind Belgium, Poland, Canada, Finland, Estonia, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein. Somewhere in the top third or so of the Euro-descended pack is hardly something to to be ashamed of.

Even Massachusetts, of course, can't match any of the East Asian countries save for descriptively ambiguous Vietnam (though Massachusetts' Asian population outscores all of East Asia except for Shanghai and Singapore--it beats Hong Kong, Taipei, South Korea, Macau, and Japan).

- Being a parochial provincial, I'm unaware of whether or not the female aversion to the STEM fields has yet reached crisis mode outside the US as it has within. Here in the states it's the second biggest problem in education (the intractable Gap forever remaining the ultimate behemoth--why, as Arne Duncan is surely aware, if only we could close the Gap, we'd shoot back into the thick of the European pack. Having closed the national Gap, we'd then be able to move on to the international Gap, snapping it shut and at last putting Liberia on equal footing with Latvia!).

If the issue doesn't have as much visibility outside the US as does within, it's not for a lack of data pointing to the problem. Teenage boys outscored their fellow female students in 51 of the 68 places where testing was administered. In four of the 68, there was no difference in male and female performance. These egalitarian paradises include Kazakhstan, Cyprus, Lithuania, and Montenegro.

Even more equal than that, though, are the countries where the girls outperformed the boys. First, the suggestive female advantages, although the sex differences do not reach the level of statistical significance at a 95% confidence rate--Albania, Russia, Bulgaria, Sweden, Finland, Singapore, Latvia, and the United Arab Emirates. Five of the 68 places are genuinely able to celebrate gender equality by pointing to statistically significant advantages among their female students over their male counterparts. These nations are Iceland, Malaysia, Thailand, Qatar, and Jordan. Looks like the only country more progressive than Qatar when it comes to women's rights is Jordan! Who knew?

Staffan mentioned sour grapes in the context of Denmark's questioning of the validity of the latest PISA results, but the Danes have a lot more to be proud of than the Chinese do. Sure, the latter may be earning higher marks on the scholastic tests, but the when it comes to the results that really matter--those measuring equality--Denmark kicks Shanghai's ass!

- Parenthetically, there is a gender gap that is more overwhelming and consistent than the one in mathematics, but it's not a problem to get worked up about. This gap actually indicates the utmost triumph of Equality--in every single pedagogical jurisdiction, all 68 out of 68 of them--girls outperformed boys in reading, and at statistically significant levels across the board to boot. Once again the two countries with the largest female advantages are Qatar and Jordan!

- Finally, how about a little curmudgeon's revenge? There really is no such thing as a free lunch:

Immigration and inbreeding

Over the last few years, the indefatigable chickadee has been telling a story about the marriage (heh) between outbreeding and modernity. In fairness to her, the approach she takes is informational, not polemical, and that conclusion is mine, not (necessarily) her's. But it's difficult not to come to that pithy conclusion regardless.

My childish infatuation with the ancients aside, I like modernity. It's not all good, though--ennui, atomization, ethno-masochism--and, apparently, the relinquishing of any sort of serious national sovereignty, solidarity, or identity. Taking the citizenship standards index values* from a post derived from World Values Survey responses and correlating them with consanguinity rates (defined as second-cousin or closer), both at the national level, yields a statistically significant positive correlation of .59 (p = .003) among the 23 countries for which both consanguinity and WVS data are available. That is, the more inbred a country is, the more restrictive the attitudes of its population are on the issues of immigration and citizenship. Conversely, the more outbred a country is, the more its inhabitants tend toward unrestricted open borders.

If you'll allow me to shamelessly quote myself:

The paradox presented here for many like myself is that the places inspiring the warmest feelings and that I would like most to live in are the places that tend to put the least effort into maintaining what they have. It's tragic.

Or maybe I'm just a retrograde troglodyte covetously trying to keep to and for myself what my ancestors rapaciously stole from the brotherhood, er, and sisterhood, of mankind humankind. I suppose I should be smart enough to know better--the inverse correlation between estimated average IQ and citizenship standards scores for the same 23 countries is a statistically significant .70 (p = .0002) at the national level. The higher the country's IQ, the more likely its people are to wave the huddled masses on through.

* See here.

** Calculated by obtaining the simple, unweighted averages of all studies reported at consang.net.

Law alone?

With a victorious--if only symbolic, temporary, and ultimately futile--stand against amnesty looking to be secured thanks to the majority of Republicans in the House, the only part of the federal government I still have any hope at all in (and that hope is shaky to say the least), let's take a look at international sentiments towards the requirements for citizenship.

In the most recent wave conducted by the WVS, running from 2005-2008, respondents were asked about the importance of four factors in deciding whether or not a person should have citizenship conferred upon him. They were having ancestors from the country, being born in the country, adopting the customs of the country, and obeying the laws of the country. Pithily, the angles we're exploring here are blood, soil, culture, and law. The first table shows the percentages of respondents in each participating country who judged it to be "very important" that a person have ancestors from the country to be considered a citizen of it:

Blood	%VI
Mali	74.1
Morocco	66.9
Egypt	63.9
Burkina Faso	61.6
South Africa	61.1
Thailand	57.1
India	56.6
Jordan	54.2
Ghana	52.9
Indonesia	51.6
Ethiopia	51.3
Mexico	50.3
Malaysia	50.1
Vietnam	47.3
Georgia	46.2
Rwanda	46.1
Zambia	42.8
Cyprus	41.3
China	39.3
Uruguay	37.6
Poland	37.5
Turkey	34.4
Chile	33.4
Trinidad and Tobago	26.9
Bulgaria	26.6
Spain	25.3
South Korea	24.6
Serbia	24.0
Ukraine	22.9
Argentina	21.2
Moldova	20.8
Slovenia	19.4
Brazil	18.5
Romania	17.9
Italy	14.6
United States	14.1
Australia	11.3
Taiwan	10.2
Germany	9.6
Finland	9.4
Norway	6.7
Andorra	4.9
Switzerland	4.5
Sweden	3.3

People of northwestern European descent put the least emphasis on the blood bond of a nation's population. The US is no exception. After all, how can a nation of immigrants, which we've always been since we gained our independence from Great Britain in 1923, prefer that its citizens' family trees be rooted firmly in the land of amber waves of grain? To the contrary, those people are the ones we look down upon with the most superciliousness and disdain today. Northwestern Euros are followed by central, southern and eastern Europeans, then Asians and Latin Americans, and finally by Middle Easterners and Africans, who put the greatest amount of emphasis on it.

There's a pattern here that surely doesn't come as much of a surprise to regular readers of the chickadee's blog. Relatedly, this list looks like it proxies pretty well for a measure of national pride. Parenthetically, I plan on correlating these results with reported rates of consanguinity by country.

The paradox presented here for many like myself is that the places inspiring the warmest feelings and that I would like most to live in are the places that tend to put the least effort into maintaining what they have. It's tragic. It doesn't strike me as overly cynical to presume that this is almost inevitable, as though liberalism doesn't know when or where to stop and just keeps cruising along the progressive highway past the promised land and over the cliff. Unfortunately, the one nation that regularly pops up as an exception to the putative rule in discussions like this was not included in this battery of questions. But even Japan has started down the slippery slope towards open immigration, recently introducing a point system, akin to the policies employed in Australia and Canada, where preference is given to highly skilled prospective immigrants.

What of birthright citizenship? Our own 14th amendment has been read by the courts in such a way that if one is able to spawn somewhere in the country, through hook, crook or otherwise, then said spawn is, jus soli, a child of the land he was born on.

The next table shows the percentages of respondents in each participating country who deemed it very important that a person be born in the country if he is to be entitled to citizenship:

Soil	%VI
Mali	68.5
South Africa	67.8
Ghana	67.7
India	66.3
Zambia	63.0
Malaysia	60.1
Thailand	59.4
Egypt	58.6
Mexico	58.5
Jordan	58.3
Indonesia	56.9
Ethiopia	53.9
Rwanda	52.3
Morocco	51.0
Burkina Faso	48.9
Chile	47.5
Georgia	45.5
Trinidad and Tobago	44.1
Uruguay	43.2
Vietnam	42.6
Poland	40.4
Spain	39.2
China	38.4
Cyprus	37.5
Turkey	34.3
Italy	32.1
Moldova	31.9
Serbia	28.4
Ukraine	28.3
Bulgaria	26.9
Romania	25.5
United States	25.3
Argentina	24.9
Brazil	23.5
Slovenia	22.9
South Korea	20.5
Andorra	17.7
Taiwan	16.0
Australia	15.7
Finland	15.7
Germany	11.4
Switzerland	8.4
Norway	7.9
Sweden	5.0

Keep in mind that the four categories considered here are not mutually exclusive, but can and do layer upon one another. It appears that most Malians, for example, feel it of great importance that citizens be born in the country, to people who have previously established ancestral ties to it, adopt Malian cultural norms, and that they respect the law of the great trading empire.

The following table shows the percentages of respondents in each participating country who deemed it very important that a person adopt the customs of the country to become a citizen of it:

Culture	%VI
Georgia	83.6
Mali	73.3
Egypt	68.7
Morocco	68.4
Australia	68.0
Ghana	66.5
Thailand	65.0
Turkey	63.6
Vietnam	63.4
Jordan	61.9
Indonesia	61.9
Malaysia	60.4
South Africa	59.4
Burkina Faso	59.4
United States	59.4
India	58.4
Mexico	58.2
Zambia	56.8
Ethiopia	53.9
Germany	53.4
Bulgaria	53.3
Chile	50.3
Slovenia	48.2
Spain	47.2
Rwanda	46.8
Finland	46.6
China	44.1
Uruguay	43.3
Cyprus	43.0
Trinidad and Tobago	42.8
Switzerland	42.1
Taiwan	39.9
Ukraine	39.5
Moldova	38.5
Norway	36.7
Romania	35.7
Poland	34.7
Italy	34.7
Argentina	33.6
Serbia	33.5
Andorra	30.4
South Korea	27.1
Brazil	26.3
Sweden	24.1

Are we all Georgians now, senator?

I've always felt a special affinity for Australia. If I were to leave the US, I'd head down under (Switzerland would be a close second, but the cultural and linguistic distances would probably be too far). It may not count for much of anything in the grand scheme of things, but they are one of the few Occidental nations whose population still maintains, with some pride, a semblance of a revered, historically-rooted national identity (the others being Israel, Ireland--dare I say--these United States, and possibly Germany). That shows up here.

With the importance of blood ties to citizenship being an idea entertained only by the most reprobate--hell, even the idea of citizenship is becoming beyond the pale--the concept of a national culture is the next wall the forces of the Cathedral are determined to scale. They've already infiltrated so far that only the most 'extreme' talkers on the mainstream right would call for a national policy resting on the three xenophobic pillars of borders, language, and, most germanely for us, culture!

Up to this point, our Scandinavian representatives haven't shown support for any standards on citizenship at all. But we have yet to discuss governmental policies. The Golem will keep the baddies out, we just need to equip him with the right tools. And then make sure he doesn't strike out against refugees--political, economic, religious, or otherwise--or those offended by depictions of Muhammad, or undocumented workers, or visa overstayers, or asylum seekers, or those looking for a better life, or those who love to feed from the public trough, or...

Law	%VI
Sweden	95.6
Norway	93.5
Australia	93.1
Finland	88.4
Switzerland	87.6
Taiwan	86.7
United States	85.0
Georgia	84.6
Germany	83.5
Trinidad and Tobago	83.2
Indonesia	82.9
Turkey	82.4
Bulgaria	82.1
Mali	81.7
Mexico	80.8
Ghana	80.4
Romania	78.7
China	78.2
Burkina Faso	78.1
Vietnam	78.0
Italy	77.7
Jordan	77.3
Egypt	76.9
Malaysia	74.8
Morocco	74.6
Uruguay	74.1
South Africa	72.9
Chile	71.3
Slovenia	71.2
India	70.9
Zambia	70.4
Moldova	68.1
Poland	68.1
Ethiopia	64.7
Argentina	63.5
Rwanda	62.1
Ukraine	58.7
Cyprus	58.2
Spain	58.1
Serbia	55.0
Thailand	54.4
Andorra	49.4
Brazil	43.5
South Korea	40.4

Several charts in rapid succession there, so here's an overall "standards" index that simply sums the percentages of "very important" responses across the four dimensions considered previously. How curious that Mexicans make greater demands of their citizens than Americans do of their's:

Standards	Index
Mali	297.6
Egypt	268.1
Ghana	267.5
South Africa	261.2
Morocco	260.9
Georgia	259.9
Indonesia	253.3
India	252.2
Jordan	251.7
Burkina Faso	248.0
Mexico	247.8
Malaysia	245.4
Thailand	235.9
Zambia	233.0
Vietnam	231.3
Ethiopia	223.8
Turkey	214.7
Rwanda	207.3
Chile	202.5
China	200.0
Uruguay	198.2
Trinidad and Tobago	197.0
Bulgaria	188.9
Australia	188.1
United States	183.8
Poland	180.7
Cyprus	180.0
Spain	169.8
Slovenia	161.7
Finland	160.1
Moldova	159.3
Italy	159.1
Germany	157.9
Romania	157.8
Taiwan	152.8
Ukraine	149.4
Norway	144.8
Argentina	143.2
Switzerland	142.6
Serbia	140.9
Sweden	128.0
South Korea	112.6
Brazil	111.8
Andorra	102.4

Things are grim on this side of the pond, but they're even grimmer in Europe. With the rise of nationalist parties in several European countries, I wonder when (or if) we'll begin to see the same.

SWPLs, stop emulating the Swedes and start taking after the Andorrans!

WVS variables used: V217, V218, V219, V220

Indonesia's Islamic spirit of tolerance

Writing at Secular Right, Andrew Stuttaford quotes Barack Obama on Indonesia:

Those things that I learned to love about Indonesia — that spirit of tolerance that is written into your constitution, symbolized in your mosques and churches and temples standing alongside each other; that spirit that is embodied in your people — that still lives on.

When evaluating flattering fluff like this, my instinct is to try and quantifiably evaluate how much truth, if any, it contains. When the subject is international in scope, the World Values Survey, imperfect and eccentric though it may be, is one of the best places to turn. In the most recent wave spanning the years 2005-2008, it asked respondents in several countries how much they trust people of a different religion than their own. There were four possible responses. I've assigned them scores of 3, 2, 1, and 0 for "trust completely", "trust a little", "trust not very much", and "not trust at all", respectively, to create a simple trust index that shows each country's mean score:

Country	Tolerance
1. Sweden	2.03
2. New Zealand	2.01
3. France	1.99
4. Norway	1.90
5. Great Britain	1.87
6. Mali*	1.85
7. Finland	1.85
8. United States	1.81
9. Canada	1.80
10. Australia	1.74
11. Switzerland	1.72
12. Andorra	1.71
13. South Africa	1.70
14. Rwanda	1.67
15. Argentina	1.63
16. Trinidad and Tobago	1.60
17. Burkina Faso	1.55
18. Uruguay	1.52
19. Ghana	1.50
20. Taiwan	1.42
21. Serbia	1.41
22. Poland	1.40
23. Brazil	1.40
24. Netherlands	1.38
25. Spain	1.37
26. India	1.36
27. Ethiopia	1.36
28. South Korea	1.35
29. Bulgaria	1.35
30. Indonesia	1.32
31. Georgia	1.31
32. Germany	1.30
33. Ukraine	1.27
34. Zambia	1.26
35. Italy	1.26
36. Malaysia	1.23
37. Chile	1.21
38. Egypt	1.21
39. Thailand	1.16
40. Colombia	1.15
41. Russia	1.15
42. Vietnam	1.15
43. Slovenia	1.11
44. Romania	1.10
45. Jordan	1.05
46. Mexico	1.02
47. Turkey	1.01
48. Cyprus	1.00
49. Moldova	0.98
50. Morocco	0.91
51. Peru	0.89
52. China	0.89

Coming in at 30 of 52 countries, Indonesia is rather middling in terms of attitudinal religious tolerance. It does better than four (or possibly five) of the six other Muslim countries on the list--Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey. *The data on Mali may have been transcribed backwards. If so, it should be placed in the company of Russia and Vietnam, which means Indonesia deserves its designation as a "moderate Muslim" country. The Mali data may be correct, on the other hand, as its responses are similar to those reported in Burkina Faso, a country that is 60% Muslim. When dealing with reliable data on Africa, a healthy dose of skepticism is always in order.

All religions are not created equal, however, and Indonesia comes in well below the Anglophone (read Christian and post-Christian) nations. By the standards Obama has grown up observing, Indonesian attitudes can hardly be said to foster a "spirit of tolerance".

Parenthetically, the Han Chinese are nationalistic, a substantial number of Germans agree with Thilo Sarrazin, Sweden is the most tolerant place in the universe, and some values do indeed stop at the Rio Grande.

WVS variables used: V129

Plurality of Americans see the Arab Spring as bad for the US

As well aware of public sentiment as I like to think I am, I'm not impervious to the occasional surprise, this one of the pleasant variety. The following graphic comes from Pew Research's recent report on how Americans feel about our involvement in the Middle East and North Africa generally and the 'Arab Spring' in particular:

Quite encouraging. Americans were instinctively skeptical of the uprisings as the numbers from the beginning as the March/April 2011 show--pluralities thought they would "not lead to lasting improvements" and would "be bad for the United States" and an outright majority, in defiance of neocons and the interventionist left, expressed a preference for stable governments over democratically formed ones in the Arab world. Since then, these "America First" positions have only become firmer.

Further, the Republican electorate appears to have lost some of the enthusiasm for preaching messianic democracy with the aim of remaking the rest of the world in our own image over the last decade:

 That shouldn't be oversold, though:

The GOP has long way to go before it's the party of Rand Paul, but the country is inching in his direction. I'll gladly take evidence that the ratchet doesn't have to inexorably move in just one direction all the time where I can get it.

Welcome news as this may be, however, it's disheartening that most Americans don't have a presidential candidate from either of the major parties who shares their sentiments on our nation's relations with Muslim countries.

Gypped by Japan

As an addendum to Half Sigma's paean to Japan, a reason I'm a favorably inclined comes from the WVS. The fifth and most recent wave includes a question querying respondents on how they feel about their respective countries providing foreign aid. Specifics aren't given, and the amount is simply .1% of each respective country's "national income" (stated on a per capita basis so as not to skew the results towards a larger population leading to less putative generosity), so it's basically a measure of magnanimity towards the rest of the world at the expense of the homeland's fiscal health. The following table ranks countries in which the question was asked (the affluent ones plus, oddly, Thailand) by what I'll call a sucker index, computed by simply taking the percentage of people who think that defined amount is "too low" and subtracting from it the percentage who deem it "too high":

Country	Sucker score
1) Andorra	70.5
2) Switzerland	45.9
3) Spain	45.5
4) Sweden	43.6
5) Norway	38.3
6) Australia	31.0
7) Finland	29.5
8) Canada	27.4
9) Germany	20.6
10) Thailand	9.9
11) United States	8.5
12) Japan	(1.6)

Germany's nicer than we are and they still get called Nazis by Greeks with their hands out. Time for us to start listening to Rand Paul and for the West to start sharing more of the Japanese sentiment.

WVS variables used: V175

Consanguinity and corruption

In the wake of MG's essay on the nature and nurture of corruption, I wondered if a hard correlation between consanguinity rates and graft at the national level had been discovered. Searching for as much, the top returns I received were from MG and HBD Chick. Apparently, it hasn't been an area of academic interest, though HBD Chick is deserving of an academic spot for her intellectual curiosity about and indefatigable efforts researching and relaying consanguinity through history and up to the present to any who happen to be interested in as much.

Why should academics and policy makers take note, though, when they've already identified the culprits? They are, of course, bad laws, bad leaders, and bad institutions! Fix these things and any country is capable of resembling Norway. Any day now we'll get the right laws and enforcement mechanisms in place and use them to throw out the crooks and set things straight in Zimbabwe, Zaire, Syria, Sudan, the Congo, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Burma, Iraq, Afghanistan, Papua New Guinea...

As is often the impetus here, not finding what I was looking for meant needing to figure it out. The data aren't perfect by any stretch, but something is better than nothing. Computing simple, unweighted averages for each country for which studies and surveys have been conducted and subsequently recorded on consang.net and then comparing them to Transparency International's 2011 Corruptions Perception Index yields a correlation of .44 (p = 0). In places where extended families are important and family members are more closely related to one another than they are in the West, outsiders are treated with much less even handedness than kin are and nepotism is, if not the rule, at least perfectly acceptable. In these places, if you're not blood, you're going to have to pay to play.

A correlation of .44 is considered fairly strong in the infinitely varied world of the social sciences, but the true relationship between corruption and consanguinity is almost certainly even more vigorous than that. I'm using imperfect and sporadic data. There is nothing available on inbreeding for about half the countries in the world while for India there are 45 studies for which I must, by necessity, compute a simple average from, because even if I wanted to try and weight the sources for geographic and demographic representativeness within India, I'd be utterly unable to do so competently since I know so little about that extremely complicated country of over 1 billion people.

Further, even to the extent that the data are representative, they leave something to be desired, as the chickadee explains:

what we are talking about here when we discuss inbreeding vs. outbreeding and nepotism and/or corruption are types of altruistic behaviors -- and these behaviors/attitudes have evolved differently in different populations, of course, over time. so you can't just take a population that has been inbreeding for scores of generations, and likely evolved certain altruistic behaviors, and change their behavior patterns via just one or two generations of outbreeding. there is going to be some lag-time.

 why do i say this? because the problem with using the consang.net numbers for the kind of analysis you describe is that there is no time depth to them. if you look at the data @consang.net, it appears as though the chinese have similar inbreeding/outbreeding rates to western europe or canada, but that's only in the last generation or so (and even that is debatable). as i've blogged about, the chinese have been inbreeding for literally millennia. any effects that's had on altruistic behaviors are NOT going to be overturned in one or two generations.

what needs to be done is that the histories of inbreeding/outbreeding in different populations need to be quantified (part of my ongoing, neverending project @hbd chick (~_^) ), and then those numbers need to be compared to transparency international's and/or other figures.

Yet despite this, we still see a rigorous, statistically significant correlation between corruption and consanguinity. Randomly generated numbers don't correlate with one another. If (when?) much of the remaining randomness in the consanguinity numbers is removed and the appropriate adjustments for time depth are made, the observed correlation will prove to be stronger still.

That good fight isn't ours

When I'm in discussions that find their way to the issues surrounding Israel and her relationships with her neighbors generally, and the Palestinians in particular, I find I often bemuse those I'm talking to because they're unsure of whether I'm "pro-Israel" or "pro-Palestinian". In imitation of Half Sigma (and correspondingly in a nod to my pseudonym), my position is as follows.

Israel's survival instincts are admirable. As an American, I can only dream of having a federal government as committed to the well-being of the nation as Israel's is. In terms of human capital and the existence of a functioning liberal, market-based society, Israel is bar none in the region. If I was randomly jettisoned somewhere in MENA, by God's good graces I'd land in Haifa or Tel Aviv. When self-righteous media types pay homage to the "international community's" alleged Israeli human rights abuses against the Palestinians, it makes me root a little harder for the Jewish state. The Palestinians are apparently world's perpetual basket cases, a real life illustration of what the rest of the non-Israeli middle eastern and north African populations would look like without oil and, to a lesser extent, tourism.

But Israel's concerns are not our own. The Great Iranian War Machine is hardly a menance to the US. Iran's population is 25% of ours, and its purchasing power parity per capita is also 25% of ours. Thus, its PPP is one-sixteenth of our own. While they were, as of 2006, devoting 2.5% of their economic output on military spending, we were expending 4.06% of our much larger output on the same. If Israel deems Iran an existential threat, well, it has an estimated 200 nuclear weapons at its disposal. And I, like so many others on the alternative right, are perpetually irritated by the influence of groups like AIPAC and the ADL on US policy decisions.

In short, if I were an Israeli, I'd be supporting exactly what Israel is doing. But I'm not, so I oppose what is being done against my own national interests on behalf of Israel's even while my sympathies are with her.

Changes in the importance of religion by country over time

In the comments to a previous post looking at changes in positions on social behaviors over time across several countries participating in the WVS, Ed Tom Kowalsky wrote:

I wonder if one could similarly track global views on immigration, religion, crime (in general) and the United States.

I thought we'd be 2 for 4, but it turns out the question on immigration policy wasn't asked in the survey's earlier years, so religion is the only additional variable the WVS provides insight into on this front. Ah well, .250 isn't terrible in baseball, so we won't complain about the survey's restrictions too much.

Parenthetically, one question related to perceptions of the United States was posed to Iraqis in the fifth wave (2005-2008) asking how much confidence they had in American troops. A staggering 88% responded with "none at all" (n = 2,577). That's what our blood, sweat, and tears got us. Awesome!

There are 26 countries that participated in the WVS during both the 1990-1991 and 2005-2008 periods, but Argentina is excluded because the question about the importance of religion in the respondent's life was not asked in the earlier take and Slovenia is excluded because the data for that country are apparently corrupt.

In the following table, a religious importance index is computed for the countries listed based on respondents' answers to the question asking how important religion is in their lives. There are four possible responses, ranging from "very important" to "not at all important". The former is assigned a multiplier of 3, the latter of 0, the "somewhat important" response of 2, and the "not too important" of 1. The percentages of respondents giving each answer are then multiplied correspondingly, and the total for each country is divided by 3 to create an index scale of 0-100, with 0 indicating that the entire population says religion is not at all important, and a 100 indicating that the entire population says it is very important.

Religious importance index scores are shown for both periods, and the column furthest to the right shows the change in score from the end of the Cold War to today:

Religious importance	90-91	05-08	Change
Brazil	78.8	79.6	0.8
Bulgaria	34.3	50.9	16.6
Canada	59.7	58.5	(1.2)
Chile	74.6	68.4	(6.2)
China	9.1	27.2	18.0
Finland	43.5	49.5	6.0
France	42.4	41.8	(0.6)
Great Britain	47.2	45.4	(1.8)
India	74.7	75.6	0.8
Italy	64.6	67.9	3.3
Japan	31.2	27.1	(4.1)
Mexico	66.3	80.2	13.9
Netherlands	45.7	34.6	(11.0)
Norway	44.7	39.1	(5.6)
Poland	79.2	77.3	(2.0)
Romania	69.9	82.1	12.2
Russia	37.2	47.9	10.8
South Africa	83.6	85.9	2.3
South Korea	55.8	49.9	(5.9)
Spain	49.7	41.4	(8.3)
Sweden	34.4	36.3	1.9
Switzerland	54.1	46.6	(7.5)
Turkey	70.1	87.8	17.8
United States	76.0	70.1	(5.9)

Without pretending to be an amateur historian, the shifts over time initially to appear to be pretty straightforward to me. In the former Soviet Union, people had lived for four decades in a society in which the elimination of religion was an official state goal and every good citizen claimed to be an atheist. Religious property was confiscated and the orthodox church was subjugated. It's not surprising that as the iron curtain was lifted and the masses were free to rediscover religion again, it made a comeback. The uptick in religious importance in China over the 15 year period presumably has a similar though less rigid explanation, as the mainland is now comparable to Japan in its self-described religiosity.

In the table above, Turkey's results also tracks well with that country's recent history. Ataturk's republic was to be a secular one, and through most of the last century, Turkey has consistently been described as the most modern, moderate Islamic country in the MENA. More recently though, Turkey has been becoming more accommodating towards pious Muslim sensibilities. Erdogan, prime minister since 2003, has overseen a shift away from secularism in the country. That's what Western media report anyway, and the WVS lends credence to it.

Hindus are holding the line. Good for them.

So are South Africans. Running a few more of those unbelieving Dutch devils out since apartheid ended couldn't have hurt the cause!

The US, along with Catholic Poland and to a lesser extent Italy, are still far more overtly religious than the rest of western Europe is, with Canada falling in between, but in the Occident and its offshoots, the story has been one of gentle and steady decline at roughly equal rates across countries.

Being a good American, I don't know much about the cultural happenings in distant Mexico, choosing instead to focus my attention on places that are of greater relevance to me like Israel and Afghanistan. Consequently, the fairly substantial increase in religious importance to my south isn't something I'm easily able to account for. I think the ruling National Action party is more socially conservative and religious than the other two major parties in Mexico are, and it's held the presidency since 2000, so maybe the two are related. Or perhaps the increasing violence and instability that has characterized the country over the last several years as its government fights with drug cartels has pushed people towards greater spirituality, as I think Agnostic would predict.

WVS variables used: V9, V146ZA

Changes in positions on social behaviors over time, by country

Thinking about Razib's post at Discover magazine and then responding to Razib's subsequent comments on the same, Parapundit's Randall Parker wonders how stable social values are across countries:

It occurs to me that stability in how countries poll in world values surveys is an argument against the idea that the world is inevitably going to become liberal.

There are changes in wording in most of the survey questions by wave (that is, years in which surveys were conducted), but there is quite a bit of consistent overlap in a section over how justifiable certain "hot button" social behaviors are. The number of countries participating picks up enough in the 1990-1991 wave (before that, the pickings are pretty sparse) to make comparisons to the most recent 2005-2008 wave. This 1990-1991 wave corresponds fairly closely with the "end of history" predicted by Francis Fukuyama, when all countries were predicted to be moving inexorably towards liberal democracy.

The following tables show the mean responses of survey participants by country in the 90-91 wave, the 05-08 wave, and the shift in mean score over that decade and a half time period, by social issue. All questions ask respondents how often they feel the behavior in question is justifiable, with potential answers on a 10-point scale ranging from "never justifiable" (1) to "always justifiable" (10). So the higher the score, the more liberal a country's population is. If a country's values have liberalized (which, in the context of this post, refers to the freedom of the individual to choose to behave however he pleases) over time, the result is a positive number in the last column. Conversely, if the country has become less liberalized, the number will be negative.

There are data for 26 countries in both waves, though Slovenia is not included in any of the proceeding tables*. The WVS is mostly populated by affluent, first-world countries, especially in the earlier waves, so the only Islamic representative is Turkey:

Claiming government benefits	90-91	05-08	Change
Argentina	1.9	3.6	1.7
Brazil	2.7	2.7	0.0
Bulgaria	1.8	2.2	0.4
Canada	1.9	1.9	0.0
Chile	4.1	4.3	0.2
China	1.7	3.3	1.6
Finland	4.7	2.1	(2.6)
France	3.5	3.1	(0.4)
Great Britain	1.8	2.2	0.4
India	1.8	3.1	1.3
Italy	2.0	1.6	(0.4)
Japan	2.0	2.1	0.1
Mexico	4.9	4.1	(0.8)
Netherlands	1.6	1.5	(0.1)
Norway	1.4	2.1	0.7
Poland	2.1	2.3	0.2
Romania	1.7	2.0	0.3
Russia	2.1	2.8	0.7
South Africa	2.3	2.6	0.3
South Korea	2.2	2.8	0.6
Spain	2.8	2.5	(0.3)
Sweden	1.6	1.9	0.3
Switzerland	1.9	1.5	(0.4)
Turkey	1.5	1.6	0.1
United States	1.9	2.3	0.4

One standard deviation is 2.7 points, so the average Mexican resident is two-thirds of one SD further to the left (that is, at about the 72nd percentile of the US distribution) than the average American is. Yet another argument free market libertarians should employ when clamoring for open borders!

It's in the European welfare states like Finland and France--where liberalism has been normative for the longest--where the most backsliding has taken place. In most countries though, there has been a moderate shift towards liberalism.

Someone accepting a bribe	90-91	05-08	Change
Argentina	1.1	1.4	0.3
Brazil	1.4	1.9	0.5
Bulgaria	1.5	1.9	0.4
Canada	1.6	1.6	0.0
Chile	1.5	1.7	0.2
China	1.3	1.7	0.4
Finland	1.6	1.6	0.0
France	2.1	2.2	0.1
Great Britain	1.5	1.6	0.1
India	1.4	3.0	1.6
Italy	1.6	1.3	(0.3)
Japan	1.8	1.5	(0.3)
Mexico	2.8	2.4	(0.4)
Netherlands	1.8	1.5	(0.3)
Norway	1.5	1.5	0.0
Poland	1.6	1.4	(0.2)
Romania	2.1	1.4	(0.7)
Russia	1.4	1.8	0.4
South Africa	2.1	2.4	0.3
South Korea	1.8	1.6	(0.2)
Spain	1.5	1.8	0.3
Sweden	1.6	2.0	0.4
Switzerland	1.5	1.5	0.0
Turkey	1.2	1.3	0.1
United States	1.5	1.7	0.2

One SD is 1.6 points. Public positions on bribery have held fairly steady since the collapse of communism, although to the extent that they've moved at all, it's been in a liberal direction everywhere except some of Europe's more corrupt countries, our neighbor to the south, and surprisingly, the Netherlands.

Homosexuality	90-91	05-08	Change
Argentina	3.0	5.3	2.3
Brazil	2.4	4.2	1.8
Bulgaria	1.8	4.1	2.3
Canada	4.1	5.7	1.6
Chile	1.8	4.9	3.1
China	1.2	1.6	0.4
Finland	4.4	5.9	1.5
France	3.9	6.5	2.6
Great Britain	3.5	5.7	2.2
India	1.2	3.0	1.8
Italy	3.6	3.3	(0.3)
Japan	2.4	4.8	2.4
Mexico	2.9	4.5	1.6
Netherlands	7.2	7.2	0.0
Norway	4.1	7.7	3.6
Poland	1.8	3.1	1.3
Romania	1.5	2.1	0.6
Russia	1.4	2.5	1.1
South Africa	2.3	3.0	0.7
South Korea	1.6	2.8	1.2
Spain	3.4	6.7	3.3
Sweden	4.5	8.4	3.9
Switzerland	4.2	7.3	3.1
Turkey	1.6	1.7	0.1
United States	3.1	4.6	1.5

One SD is 3.5 points. It's not just in the US where the legalization of same-sex marriage appears to be an inevitability. There has been a veritable worldwide shifting in moral perceptions of homosexuality in less than one generation, with the only countries holding the line against a rain of fire and brimstone being the Catholic stronghold of Italy and Muslim Turkey (well, perceptions among the Dutch have remained constant, but are coming from a position that was already very tolerant towards homosexuality). Turkey, along with China, is far less tolerant of homosexuality than the rest of the countries represented are.

Prostitution	90-91	05-08	Change
Argentina	2.1	4.1	2.0
Brazil	2.0	3.1	1.1
Bulgaria	2.2	3.0	0.8
Canada	3.4	3.3	(0.1)
Chile	1.8	3.5	1.7
China	1.2	1.4	0.2
Finland	4.3	3.1	(1.2)
France	3.2	3.4	0.2
Great Britain	3.1	3.9	0.8
India	1.5	3.1	1.6
Italy	2.5	2.4	(0.1)
Japan	1.9	2.0	0.1
Mexico	3.2	3.9	0.7
Netherlands	5.5	5.6	0.1
Norway	2.1	4.1	2.0
Poland	1.6	2.5	0.9
Romania	1.9	2.1	0.2
Russia	1.8	2.3	0.5
South Africa	2.1	2.5	0.4
South Korea	2.2	2.5	0.3
Spain	2.8	4.6	1.8
Sweden	2.1	3.1	1.0
Switzerland	3.7	5.1	1.4
Turkey	1.7	1.8	0.1
United States	2.4	3.2	0.8

One SD is 2.8 points. The world's oldest profession is seeing many of its modern objectors falling away, as positions on prostitution have become more liberalized in nearly every country surveyed, with Finland the one glaring exception. Again we see that positions in China and Turkey have moved very little over the time period.

Abortion	90-91	05-08	Change
Argentina	3.4	3.2	(0.2)
Brazil	2.5	2.4	(0.1)
Bulgaria	5.1	5.6	0.5
Canada	4.9	4.7	(0.2)
Chile	1.8	2.6	0.8
China	4.9	2.1	(2.8)
Finland	6.5	5.5	(1.0)
France	5.0	6.5	1.5
Great Britain	4.5	4.9	0.4
India	3.4	3.3	(0.1)
Italy	4.3	3.5	(0.8)
Japan	3.7	4.6	0.9
Mexico	3.8	3.2	(0.6)
Netherlands	5.2	5.5	0.3
Norway	5.0	6.7	1.7
Poland	3.2	3.0	(0.2)
Romania	4.9	3.3	(1.6)
Russia	4.5	4.1	(0.4)
South Africa	2.8	2.6	(0.2)
South Korea	4.2	3.5	(0.7)
Spain	4.1	5.5	1.4
Sweden	5.4	7.8	2.4
Switzerland	3.2	5.5	2.3
Turkey	4.2	2.3	(1.9)
United States	4.0	4.5	0.5

One SD is 3.1 points. As liberalism traipses across the globe, it gets tripped up on the issue of abortion. While many social conservatives in the US despair of what they perceive to be an abandonment of values at home, the moral trajectory of abortion is far less clear than it is of homosexuality.

China, where penalties can still result when an abortion is not undergone by Han who violate the one-child policy, has seen a significant shift towards a more pro-life position as the aberration that is the country's procreation-limiting policy has presumably become more widely understood by the Chinese populous.

Turkey, which has yet to show any liberalizing in sentiment, continues not to show any here.

It's tempting to think that birth dearths in countries where public sentiment has moved away from abortion rights like Russia, Romania, South Korea, and Italy is a result of said decline in fecundity, but there are other nations like Norway, France, and Spain that are well below replacement level fertility yet have nonetheless become more inclined towards abortion over the same period of time.

Divorce	90-91	05-08	Change
Argentina	5.8	6.5	0.7
Brazil	4.9	5.6	0.7
Bulgaria	4.5	6.4	1.9
Canada	5.6	6.0	0.4
Chile	3.5	6.0	2.5
China	4.8	2.7	(2.1)
Finland	7.2	6.8	(0.4)
France	5.6	6.9	1.3
Great Britain	5.3	6.4	1.1
India	2.7	3.9	1.2
Italy	5.2	5.0	(0.2)
Japan	4.9	6.4	1.5
Mexico	4.8	5.3	0.5
Netherlands	6.1	6.4	0.3
Norway	5.3	7.2	1.9
Poland	4.2	4.7	0.5
Romania	5.0	4.2	(0.8)
Russia	4.8	5.4	0.6
South Africa	3.5	3.9	0.4
South Korea	4.3	4.6	0.3
Spain	5.3	7.1	1.8
Sweden	6.3	8.4	2.1
Switzerland	4.8	6.9	2.1
Turkey	5.0	3.4	(1.6)
United States	4.9	5.8	0.9

One SD is 3.1 points. Most countries have been moving in a liberal direction with two notable--and now familiar--exceptions; Turkey and China. Of course, with one-sixth of the world's population, when China moves one direction, even if the rest of the world is moving in the opposite direction, it's tough to sell the change as inexorable on the world stage. What about India and Brazil, two other non-Western and non-East Asian countries with large populations? On abortion, they both have treaded water. On all the other social issues considered thus far, they've shifted in a liberal direction (as have Argentina and Chile, the other two Latin American countries represented in the WVS).

Euthanasia	90-91	05-08	Change
Argentina	3.2	4.0	0.8
Brazil	2.7	3.5	0.8
Bulgaria	3.5	5.6	2.1
Canada	5.0	5.3	0.3
Chile	2.7	3.7	1.0
China	6.7	3.3	(3.4)
Finland	6.2	5.8	(0.4)
France	5.2	6.8	1.6
Great Britain	4.7	6.1	1.4
India	3.3	3.9	0.6
Italy	3.6	3.9	0.3
Japan	5.3	6.5	1.2
Mexico	4.2	4.3	0.1
Netherlands	5.9	6.3	0.4
Norway	4.2	5.6	1.4
Poland	2.1	3.4	1.3
Romania	3.5	3.0	(0.5)
Russia	3.6	5.3	1.7
South Africa	3.3	3.2	(0.1)
South Korea	n/a	n/a	n/a
Spain	3.9	5.6	1.7
Sweden	5.0	6.7	1.7
Switzerland	5.2	6.6	1.4
Turkey	3.0	2.8	(0.2)
United States	4.2	4.9	0.7

One SD is 3.3 points. On what social conservatives deem "sanctity of life" issues in the US, China has markedly shifted away from a liberal position. Turkey again shows no evidence of liberalization. South Africa, the only sub-Saharan African country represented, has, excepting abortion, become more liberal on all the issues considered thus far. When it comes to euthanasia, however, South Africans, along with the Turks, have not undergone any change in public sentiment.

Suicide	90-91	05-08	Change
Argentina	1.7	2.3	0.6
Brazil	1.4	1.8	0.4
Bulgaria	2.3	2.5	0.2
Canada	2.9	2.8	(0.1)
Chile	1.7	2.3	0.6
China	2.6	1.8	(0.8)
Finland	3.8	3.3	(0.5)
France	3.8	3.8	0.0
Great Britain	3.2	3.8	0.6
India	1.6	3.4	1.8
Italy	2.1	2.1	0.0
Japan	2.7	2.9	0.2
Mexico	3.2	2.6	(0.6)
Netherlands	4.4	3.8	(0.6)
Norway	2.6	3.4	0.8
Poland	2.2	2.3	0.1
Romania	1.9	1.5	(0.4)
Russia	2.2	2.2	0.0
South Africa	2.1	2.4	0.3
South Korea	2.9	2.9	0.0
Spain	2.2	3.1	0.9
Sweden	3.4	4.4	1.0
Switzerland	3.0	4.6	1.6
Turkey	1.7	1.5	(0.2)
United States	2.2	2.8	0.6

One standard deviation is 2.9 points. There hasn't been an enormous amount of change in perceptions of suicide anywhere in the last 15 years, although the ratchet is turning towards liberalism in most countries, with China and Turkey again being notable exceptions.

Most of the data comes from the Westernized world, and there's little to dispute that in the West, the move towards liberalism has been a steady one since the lifting of the iron curtain, in the former Soviet Union as well as free Europe and the US. Only on abortion has Russian opinion moved away from liberalism. In Latin America, India, and to a lesser extent, South Africa, it has been the same story--excepting abortion, all have become more liberal.

China and Turkey, however, have conspicuously not. Turkey is more liberal (or in media parlance, more "moderate") than North Africa, which is in turn more liberal than Egypt and most of the Middle East. I'm certainly not qualified to say whether or not Turkey proxies well for the rest of the Muslim world in terms of liberalization of social mores, and Turkey has notoriously crept away from secularism over the last couple of decades, but it at least suggests that Randall's suspicion that the move towards liberalism is evitable may be accurate. And this century is going to be a Sinitic story much more than the last one was. If the Muslim world, where fertility is still high, and China, where wealth and worldwide influence are on the rise, are not liberalizing, liberalism's future is not too bright.

Parenthetically, this is hardly a novel concept. Pat Buchanan dealt with it in his invaluable The Death of the West, and Steve Sailer added to it in his review of Buchanan's book.

WVS variables used: V201, V202, V203, V204, V205, V206, V207

* There were obviously some errors in coding the Slovenian responses for the 05-08 wave, as I first became aware of a couple of years ago. The data corruption extends beyond the one item I initially noticed it on, as the responses for all of the justification questions are extreme outliers, with virtually every behavior being almost always justifiable if the WVS data are to be trusted (which I'm confident in saying should not be done).

Mexican fatalism

I don't tap into the World Values Survey nearly as often as I'd ideally like to because it's more difficult to trust than the GSS is. Sometimes the problems are apparently just coding errors, but often the issues involve representative sampling (or the lack thereof), confusion in translation, or something else. Exacerbating this challenge, it's tougher for me to use my intuition as a first approximation of whether or not the results are flawed when the comparisons are between Slovenia and Andorra than when they're between Kansas and New York because I'm merely a citizen of the US, not of the world.

That said, Steve Sailer recently recounted the following childhood experience from Mexico:

Having traveled a modest amount in Mexico with my father when I was young, it seemed like a not badly behaved place. Mexico under the PRI was a police state, although only a small fraction of the large number of policemen were efficient and formidable. The populace was fairly cowed and meek, at least when sober. Bad driving and accidents were a major problem (presumably originating in Mexican fatalism), and petty graft was an annoyance, but outright crime wasn't a major problem for tourists.

People enjoying relatively high socio-economic status tend to be less fatalistic than people on lower rungs of the ladder do, and I suspect this pattern would manifest itself at the national level, but being the parochial guy that I am, I wasn't aware of Mexicans being particularly fatalistic.

The WVS (fourth wave) offers some potential insight into the question. The following table ranks the participating countries by how much control over their lives respondents in those countries feel they have. The higher the self-determination score, the less fatalistic the country is:

Countries	SD
1. Mexico	8.4
2. Colombia	8.0
3. Argentina, New Zealand, Trinidad/Tobago	7.9
4. Sweden, Uruguay	7.8
5. Norway, Brazil, Andorra	7.7
6. United States, Canada, South Africa, Australia, Switzerland, Romania, Jordan	7.6
7. Finland, Slovenia, Cyprus, Guatemala	7.5
8. Turkey, Indonesia	7.4
9. Great Britain, Taiwan, Malaysia	7.3
10. Chile, China, Zambia	7.2
11. Peru, Ghana, Vietnam, Iran	7.1
12. Russia	7.0
13. Spain, Moldova, Thailand	6.9
14. Germany	6.8
15. France, the Netherlands, South Korea	6.7
16. Poland	6.6
17. Serbia, Rwanda	6.5
18. Georgia	6.4
19. Italy, Hong Kong	6.3
20. Ethiopia	6.2
21. Japan, Egypt, Mali	6.1
22. India, Ukraine	6.0
23. Bulgaria	5.8
24. Burkina Faso	5.7
25. Iraq	5.4
26. Morocco	5.3

With Egypt, Mali, Iraq, and Morocco at the bottom of the list, at first blush it appears that Muslim countries are more fatalistic than non-Muslim countries are, in accordance with the thesis put forth by the late Samuel Huntington. However, Turkey, Jordan, and Indonesia are among countries where the greatest levels of self-determination are perceived, in conflict with that observation.

The Anglophone nations are all bunched pretty close to one another, with the three largest British offshoots having the same self-determination scores. Along with Scandanavia, these countries are less fatalistic than eastern and southern European countries are.

One standard deviation is 2.3 self-determination points, so the gap between Morocco and Mexico is almost 1.5 standard deviations wide, suggesting that the average Moroccan is more fatalistic than over 90% of Mexicans are. That revelation stuns me, and I have no idea how accurately it reflects reality (see the opening paragraph!). Given that Steve has the opposite impression of Mexico, I'll withhold judgment. There does appear to be some geographical consistency with regards to Mexico, though--the other Latin American countries represented cluster near the top of the list as well. Peru is the most fatalistic country to our south, and it's in the middle of the pack.

Let's look a little closer to home. The GSS queried respondents on something similar in 2008, asking them to state whether or not they agreed with the statement that "there is little that people can do to change the course of their lives". Again, the higher the score, the less fatalistic and more self-determinative the group is (n = 1,356):

Race	SD
Whites	4.14
Asians	4.04
Blacks	3.74
Hispanics	3.38

One standard deviation is 1.01 points, so the difference between whites and Hispanics is substantial, with Hispanics being considerably more fatalistic than other Americans are. Perhaps self-determination is one of the few things that does stop at the Rio Grande. Or maybe Steve is correct and the WVS is once again shown not to be very useful. In Sailer and GSS v. the WVS, my money is on the plaintiffs!

WVS variables used: V46 (excluding DK/NA)

GSS variables used: RACECEN1(1)(2)(4-10)(15-16), FATALISM

Old Republican white men know what's going on in the world

Over the last four years, I've tracked the results of Pew's "News IQ" quizzes that are periodically administered to a random sample of around 1,000 Americans. A couple of remarkably consistent results are how men are better informed than women are and that the average American is far less informed than readers of this and similar blogs are.

Unfortunately, as honest as Pew is when it comes to the reports it commissions, politically correct acts of omission are far more common than they should be, if imparting honest information to its readers is truly Pew's primary motivation. Consequently, these quizzes never provide demographic data by race or ethnicity, the categories being limited to sex, age range, educational attainment, and partisan affiliation.

In the official report accompanying the latest survey results released a few days ago, the sex category has been scrubbed as well. When something becomes as depressingly mundane as the fact that men are better informed on current events than women are, it's past time to stop talking about it.

However, sex differences are still available at the political quiz index page that is accessible once a user has completed the quiz. Same old, same old, of course--men averaged 8.5 correct answers, while women answered 6.8 questions correctly on average. Even on the item asking quiz takers to identify a picture of Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor, men outperformed women, although only by a 6 point margin, the narrowest of the 13 questions. The widest sex gap, of 21 points, was on the question about the number of US military fatalities that have occurred in Afghanistan. It involves war, Asia, and numbers--so no surprise there.

The second consistency remains in clear view, however. Take a minute to complete the quiz yourself. Per usual, I scored a perfect 13 of 13 because for someone who follows the news, it's not a difficult thing to do. Yet the average American missed 5 or 6 of them. Most people simply don't pay much attention to what takes place outside of their own personal lives beyond some degree of exposure to various forms of popular entertainment.

As those things are blase, let's consider another aspect of the results that inexplicably don't ever garner media attention, even though they are a lot less threatening to the egalitarian zeitgeist than racial or sex disparities are, since they involve propositional categories. That is, they are not fixed, so with more education and greater awareness, this gap can be closed! The aspect at issue here is partisan affiliation (see p5). On every question posed (including the one asking participants to identify Hillary Clinton by photo that should presumably be skewed in the Democrats' favor), Republicans outscored Democrats, by double-digit margins on a majority of them.

Race presumably accounts for much of the Republican advantage, which is why it would be more interesting to see a partisan breakdown among whites alone. As perverse as it is, in this facet of the status-mongering game, conservatives have a vested interest in ignoring HBD. Because NAMs identify by overwhelming margins more with the Democratic party more than they do with the GOP, measures of knowledge, behavior, and life outcomes inevitably cast Republicans in a better light than they do Democrats.

Finally, take a gander at the results by age range (p6). The online version of the quiz only includes 13 of the 19 items administered in the official survey, but of the full 19, younger people outscored their elders on only two: The ability to correctly identify the crescent star as being associated with Islam and the capability to point out Brazil on a map of South America. In our ever diversifying future, though, these two items are of greater importance than the rest, like who the secretary of state is, what percentage of Americans are unemployed, or where the DJIA is!

* Which, in my case, simply consists of listening to the top of the hour news updates on one of the local AM talk stations or NPR at some point during the day--that limited amount of effort is sufficient to ace these quizzes.

National government spending as a percentage of GDP by country

A few years ago, I became frustrated when unable to find a table of national governmental expenditures as a percentage of GDP by country. So, using data from the invaluable CIA World Factbook, I created one.

It's gathered some dust, and an update is in line, especially since something or other having to do with the global economy occurred between then and 2010, from which the most recent data come. An inquiry from an author (who I won't name but who is certainly welcome to be made known in the comments if he so desires) searching for more recent numbers served as the impetus to actually get it done. Getting out in front of the inevitable objections, a disclaimer: These data do not include all government spending and state, local, and provincial government outlays of course differ from country to country. For consistency, all figures are in exchange rate terms:

Country	GE as GDP
1. Iraq	88.1%
2. Cuba	86.5%
3. Ireland	67.0%
4. Lesotho	65.5%
5. Denmark	58.4%
6. France	55.7%
7. Finland	53.6%
8. Sweden	53.4%
9. Belgium	53.0%
10. Austria	52.9%
11. Libya	52.2%
12. Netherlands	51.3%
13. Italy	51.2%
14. United Kingdom	50.9%
15. Portugal	50.6%
16. Iceland	50.1%
17. Bosnia and Herzegovina	49.8%
18. Hungary	49.3%
19. Greece	49.3%
20. Serbia	49.3%
21. Equatorial Guinea	47.3%
22. Cyprus	46.6%
23. Germany	46.5%
24. Norway	46.3%
25. Slovenia	46.3%
26. Belarus	45.1%
27. Spain	44.9%
28. New Zealand	44.4%
29. Cape Verde	43.9%
30. Canada	43.8%
31. Latvia	42.8%
32. Bolivia	42.5%
33. Botswana	42.5%
34. Croatia	42.4%
35. Malta	41.8%
36. Eritrea	41.8%
37. Brunei	41.7%
38. Lithuania	41.4%
39. Luxembourg	41.3%
40. Slovakia	41.0%
41. Moldova	40.8%
42. Japan	40.6%
43. Romania	39.3%
44. Swaziland	38.9%
45. Estonia	38.8%
46. Bulgaria	38.0%
47. Algeria	37.8%
48. Saudi Arabia	37.7%
49. Chad	37.3%
50. Oman	37.2%
51. Macedonia	36.4%
52. Czech Republic	35.8%
53. Australia	35.7%
54. South Africa	35.6%
55. Burundi	35.3%
56. Malawi	35.3%
57. Trinidad and Tobago	35.0%
58. Georgia	34.8%
59. Switzerland	34.7%
60. Angola	34.6%
61. Ukraine	34.3%
62. Vietnam	33.7%
63. Mongolia	33.1%
64. Nicaragua	32.9%
65. Kuwait	32.9%
66. Namibia	32.6%
67. Jamaica	32.6%
68. Israel	32.4%
69. Kyrgyzstan	32.3%
70. Uzbekistan	32.2%
71. Seychelles	31.9%
72. Ecuador	30.9%
73. Papua New Guinea	30.8%
74. Aruba	30.7%
75. Uruguay	30.5%
76. Mozambique	30.2%
77. Zimbabwe	30.1%
78. Egypt	29.8%
79. Guyana	29.7%
80. Albania	29.6%
81. Jordan	29.4%
82. Nepal	29.0%
83. Lebanon	28.8%
84. Belize	28.7%
85. Colombia	28.3%
86. Kenya	28.1%
87. Gabon	27.8%
88. Panama	27.6%
89. Burkina Faso	27.5%
90. British Virgin Islands	27.4%
91. Venezuela	27.4%
92. Brazil	27.4%
93. Senegal	27.3%
94. Yemen	27.2%
95. Bahrain	27.0%
96. Azerbaijan	26.9%
97. Armenia	26.5%
98. Malaysia	26.5%
99. Turkey	26.3%
100. Morocco	26.3%
101. Tunisia	26.3%
102. Rwanda	26.2%
103. Tajikistan	26.1%
104. Ghana	25.9%
105. Tanzania	25.5%
106. Mauritius	25.5%
107. Mexico	25.4%
108. Syria	25.2%
109. Iran	25.2%
110. Sierra Leone	24.5%
111. Qatar	24.4%
112. Kazakhstan	23.7%
113. United States	23.6%
114. Argentina	23.5%
115. Russia	23.3%
116. Zambia	23.2%
117. China	23.0%
118. Sri Lanka	22.8%
119. Chile	22.8%
120. Guinea	22.6%
121. El Salvador	22.5%
122. Honduras	22.2%
123. Togo	22.1%
124. South Korea	22.1%
125. Cote d'Ivoire	22.0%
126. Haiti	21.6%
127. Benin	21.3%
128. Afghanistan	21.1%
129. Laos	21.1%
130. United Arab Emirates	21.0%
131. Poland	20.9%
132. Republic of the Congo	20.6%
133. Pakistan	20.4%
134. Costa Rica	19.8%
135. Cameroon	19.7%
136. Sudan	19.5%
137. Thailand	19.5%
138. Peru	19.5%
139. Taiwan	19.0%
140. Gambia	18.8%
141. Indonesia	18.8%
142. Cambodia	18.6%
143. Philippines	17.9%
144. India	17.5%
145. Paraguay	17.4%
146. Hong Kong	17.3%
147. Bahamas	17.2%
148. Uganda	17.2%
149. Ethiopia	16.9%
150. Central African Republic	16.5%
151. Dominican Republic	16.5%
152. Madagascar	16.2%
153. Nigeria	15.5%
154. Bangladesh	15.1%
155. Singapore	14.5%
156. Guatemala	14.5%
157. Turkmenistan	9.3%

To view a visual representation, click here.

As the Iraq war finally draws to a close, at least we were able to transfer one tenet of contemporary Western democracies in a recognizable form to Baghdad. What's that? Isonomy? Respect for dissenting viewpoints? Individual liberty? No, no, no, Don Quixote. It's big government, of course!

Outside of a few paradises like Cuba, Western Europe dominates the top spots. The US figure, in comparison, is a bit of an apples-to-oranges one, as the table is, as mentioned previously, constructed on central (that is, federal) governmental expenditures and does not directly include the spending by local, state, or provincial governments. Around 40% of government spending in the US is doled out through state and local governments, a proportion higher than just about anywhere else in the world. Consequently, the US ratio appears deceptively small.

Still, if non-federal spending is included, the US is neck and neck with Japan, well below the bulk of the rest of the Western world. As ubiquitous as government seems to be stateside, its presence is relatively small compared to Europe.

Parenthetically, Switzerland (for which the CIA factbook includes cantonal and municipal spending in addition to federal spending) , a favorite of the American alternative right, stands apart from the rest of the Old Continent. In so many ways, this beautiful Alpine country instills in pessimistic conservatives a hope for what might yet be.

As a Radio Derb votary, I've long wondered why Turkmenistan is singled out as recipient of so much love on the weekly broadcast. To an ignorant yankee like myself, it's scarcely distinguishable from the rest of the crapistans. I need wonder no longer. The Derb may claim that the president's name is the source of affection, but the table above reveals the truth of the matter!

The relative paucity of government spending in affluent East Asian nations like Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and even officially communist China is to some extent a consequence of the absence of generous government-provided welfare systems in these places, with pensions, medical care, and the like mostly covered by employers rather than by the state, as tends to be the case in Western Europe.

There is a statistically significant but modestly positive correlation (.22, p = .01) between a country's per capita GDP and that country's amount of government spending as a share of its GDP. Correlation is not necessarily causation, of course, but with otherwise backwards countries that have enormous resource wealth (ie, Botswana and Saudi Arabia) tending towards the leviathan end of the governmental expenditures scale, to the extent that the causation arrow exists, it probably points from high GDP towards prodigious government spending rather than the other way around.

On its face, there doesn't appear to be much here that validates the libertarian view that minimizing the size of the federal government, and avoiding the consequent economic distortions its continued growth will otherwise cause, should be the exclusive goal of a society wanting economic prosperity and an overall improved quality of life. Ceteris paribus it's relevant, perhaps (I certainly think it is), but there are clearly a host of other demographic and cultural variables that are of greater importance. Who would rather operate a business--or live--in Nigeria instead of in Denmark?