Paul Graham, in his essay 'The Word Hacker' asserts "If you made a graph of GNP per capita vs. civil liberties, you'd notice a definite trend." I thought I'd test this, so had a quick look around the CIA World Factbook to get some data.
This was completely non-scientific, just pulling info on a few countries more or less at random, but is vaguely interesting.
| Country | GDP per capita ($) | Gratuitous graphic bit |
| USA | 40100 |  |
| Switzerland | 33800 | |
| Ireland | 31900 | |
| Canada | 31500 | |
| Australia | 30700 | |
| UK | 29600 | |
| Netherlands | 29500 | |
| Japan | 29400 | |
| France | 28700 | |
| Germany | 28700 | |
| Sweden | 28400 | |
| Spain | 23300 | |
| New Zealand | 23200 | |
| South Korea | 19200 | |
| Saudi Arabia | 12000 | |
| South Africa | 11100 | |
| Russia | 9800 | |
| Iran | 7700 | |
| Romania | 7700 | |
| Turkey | 7400 | |
| Venezuela | 5800 | |
| China | 5600 | |
| Egypt | 4200 | |
| India | 3100 | |
| Cuba | 3000 | |
| Pakistan | 2200 | |
| North Korea | 1700 | |
| Uganda | 1500 | |
| Nigeria | 1000 | |
| Somalia | 600 | |
A couple of countries I tried to access resulted in "access forbidden": Afghanistan and Zimbabwe. I didn't spend too much effort looking for others.
While all this proves absolutely nothing, there are a few interesting things to be seen like, for example, that South Korea has more that 10 times the per capita GDP than North Korea, or that Ireland does better than most of Europe. Actually, I am mildly surprised to see the USA so far in front too.
2 comments:
You might want to take a look at Clive Hamilton's website for the bookGrowth Fetish. [ You don't want to believe the "people also bought these books" links from Amazon if you go there to buy the book... ]
The web site has some sample chapters from Growth Fetish and his new book Affluenza.
Chapter 2 of GF is the one which is relevant to your little GDP table. In it Clive discusses the relationship between happiness and GDP. He concludes that, apart from the sadness due to extreme poverty, there isn't a direct relationship between higher GDP and higher happiness ratings.
Thanks for that, Phillip, it looks interesting. There does seem to be an assumption in both business and government that growth is necessary for the health of the company/country. A bit like how there seems to be an assumption that if population levels aren't constantly rising then there is something wrong.
Actually, after I got the data above, I thought that perhaps it would be interesting to look at the growth figures the CIA posts for each country to see how that looks. But that's for another day. Maybe.
Post a Comment