{"id":3702,"date":"2015-12-29T18:59:44","date_gmt":"2015-12-30T00:59:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/?p=3702"},"modified":"2015-12-29T19:02:21","modified_gmt":"2015-12-30T01:02:21","slug":"graph-week-inequality-irreligiosity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/2015\/12\/29\/graph-week-inequality-irreligiosity\/","title":{"rendered":"Graph of the Week \u2013 Inequality and Irreligiosity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at Pew Research<\/a>, Angelina E. Theodorou<\/a>\u00a0has posted an\u00a0insightful graph\u00a0showing the relationship between religiosity (as measured by Pew’s 2015 Global Attitudes Survey) and per\u00a0capita GDP adjusted for purchasing power<\/a>\u00a0(estimated by the IMF World Economic Outlook Database).\u00a0This graph is certainly worth pondering seriously,\u00a0but it suffers from the fact that per capita<\/em>\u00a0is arithmetic jargon for the (demonstrably\u00a0counterfactual) notion that wealth may be\u00a0distributed evenly across all of a nation’s\u00a0citizenry. Perhaps the\u00a0variance in religiosity\u00a0between well-developed and prosperous nations (read: OECD members) may\u00a0be\u00a0explained not so much by\u00a0differences in per capita output between nations as by differences in how wealth is distributed within those societies.<\/p>\n

In an effort to\u00a0dip the proverbial quantitative toe into this problem, I’ve\u00a0plotted the religiosity survey\u00a0data\u00a0from Pew against the Gini coefficients<\/a> for existing OECD nations<\/a>, plus a handful of\u00a0economically powerful nations which have\u00a0yet to join<\/a> the OECD.<\/p>\n

\"Untitled\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A few brief\u00a0observations:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. United States\u00a0no longer shows up\u00a0as a\u00a0statistical outlier when we are looking at inequality of wealth rather than\u00a0GDP per\u00a0capita.<\/li>\n
  2. Indonesia<\/a>‘s flag looks very much like Poland<\/a>‘s flag, except upside down. Is there a bizarre international rivalry going on here, unbeknownst to provincial Americans like myself?<\/li>\n
  3. India and Indonesia (both non-OECD nations) are now outliers, indicating that nations with relatively\u00a0low\u00a0GDP per capita may\u00a0not fit well into an\u00a0inequality model.<\/li>\n
  4. Nations as economically disparate as Japan and China are relatively close together on this chart, despite being worlds apart on most per capita metrics, putting the previous\u00a0observation in some doubt.<\/li>\n
  5. Almost every nation on the graph hails from Europe or European roots. This is ably explained by either\u00a0Jared Diamond<\/a> or\u00a0Niall Ferguson<\/a>,\u00a0depending on your personal\u00a0political inclinations.<\/li>\n
  6. If you live in an economically well-developed nation which\u00a0has a Gini coefficient under .7 or so, the odds are very\u00a0good that you live in a potentially post-theistic society, one wherein less than half of the population considers religion very important to their lives. If you live in a nation that is well off\u00a0and yet has a higher Gini coefficient, the odds are good that either you speak French or else you don’t much follow international rugby.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    That’s all for now. Please feel free to add your own insights\/corrections\/complaints in the comments. (Please note that it’s not my fault that Chile’s flag looks too\u00a0much like that of Texas, or that Texas remains part of the United States. I had nothing to do with the relevant line-drawing in either case.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Over at Pew Research, Angelina E. Theodorou\u00a0has posted an\u00a0insightful graph\u00a0showing the relationship between religiosity (as measured by Pew’s 2015 Global…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":3704,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-damned-lies-and-statistics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3702","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3702"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3702\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3704"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}