At the surface this is a fun visualization and it confirms some vague stereotypes. A closer inspection shows that the appearance of 'cultural regions' is primarily done by the use of a color scheme that is taken from beyond the data plotted. Note that India and Poland are next to each other in the data space. If you ran a clustering you would find the Indo-Polish cultural group to be very hard to split. That said, I suspect that it would be very hard to convince anyone that India is more like Poland that say Bangladesh, or conversely that Poland is more like India than say Hungary. This map is perhaps a fairly arbitrary reduction in dimensionality.
The word choice for the scales is unfortunate. I would've labeled them "religious to mundane" and "locally to globally concerned." Mostly I have a problem with any definition of "traditional" which has Japan at the least traditional country.
How on earth are these metrics defined even somewhat objectively? How is it justified that countries such as China, India, and Russia occupy only one point despite being stunningly diverse polities? Why are all 'traditional' values rolled into one category? Why are 'survival' and 'self-expression' considered opposite extremes?
This is based on a certain positivist view of culture, that tries to quantify on certain cultural dimensions. This doesn't look behind coded appearances. As a specialist for Turkey I would say that it is much more secular-rationalist than Germany. But would never voice it as such, which is a form of respect. For sure in quantitative interviews one would not be able to account for that. On top of that this map's cluster is unscientific because it clusters things that are not comparable (provokes a type error). Confucian: religion, English speaking: language, South Asia: continent. I am a PhD student in intercultural management.
Brazil would have to neighbor all colors for this map to be true, including protestant Europe. For instance, Uruguay is in a place that seems correct (Uruguay was once a Brazilian province, BTW, and still has close ties).
Does anyone know what the dashed red line that roughly encloses the top-left quadrant of the map refers to?<p>The original publication that the diagram was produced for is available[1] (for purchase) from Cambridge University Press.<p>[1] - <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/modernization-cultural-change-and-democracy/value-change-and-the-persistence-of-cultural-traditions/38CE84B8D8C32E588D31A30EE7A5649F" rel="nofollow">https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/modernization-cultural-...</a>
The fact that all of the regions on this map have such odd and arbitrary shapes--along with the fact that they don't correspond to obvious clusters in the underlying scatter plot--does not inspire confidence.
This is interesting to consider in the context of Zeihan's "The Accidental Superpower"[1] which says that
- geography is destiny, and
- the U.S. won the geography lottery.<p>The idea that geography has some input to the rest of the cultures values, as shown in TFA, sounds plausible.<p>Whether Zeihan actually has the right of it isn't clear, however.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Accidental-Superpower-Generation-American-Preeminence/dp/B00P2QB8M6/ref=sr_1_4" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Accidental-Superpower-Generation-Amer...</a>
Very interesting, I would love to see level-headed discussion on this, although it might be politically fraught. I'm curious how these two axes were decided, if anyone knows.<p>Also, it makes me wonder about cultural relativism, since it seems there's this implicit sense of "progress" by the way the map was constructed. It lines up with my values, but is that my Western bias?
Interesting concept, but seems quite subjective and Eurocentric. Out of the 7 labels given, 3 are Europe-focused (Catholic Europe, Protestant Europe, English speaking). If a Muslim made this map, for example, would it make sense for them to split the world into Sunni, Shia, and Arabic speaking?
“Out of Western world countries, the United States is among the most conservative (as one of the most downwards-located countries), together with highly conservative Catholic countries such as Ireland and Poland.”<p>Abortion is now legal in Ireland[1a] – it is illegal in Poland still[1b]. (Yes, abortion was only recently legalised in Ireland but that's because it required a constitutional amendment to change the law and those sorts of votes only come round once a generation, attitudes had long since shifted.)<p>in 2015 Ireland became the first country <i>in the world</i> to approve same-sex marriage by popular vote[2a] – Poland does not legally recognize same-sex unions[2b], either in the form of marriage or civil unions.<p>Ireland ranks 3rd in the world in the Human Development Index[3], 6th in the world in the Democracy Index[4], and 15th in the Press Freedom Index[5] – Poland ranks (32nd, 57th, and 59th) and the USA ranks (15th, 25th, and 48th)<p>The view that Ireland is a highly conservative Catholic[6] country is, I would argue, a very outdated view. It's a stereotype that needs to wither on the vine, along with other crude stereotypes of the place. Of <i>course</i> there remain conservative pockets, but the same could be said for any place.<p>My point being, if the chart (and article) are that off base about a country I know about how can I trust it is correct about other countries I am less familiar with? It all seems hopelessly reductive, almost a stereotyped distortion of reality.<p>[1a] <a href="https://www2.hse.ie/abortion/" rel="nofollow">https://www2.hse.ie/abortion/</a><p>[1b] <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/01/08/poland-is-trying-to-make-abortion-dangerous-illegal-and-impossible/" rel="nofollow">https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/01/08/poland-is-trying-to-mak...</a><p>[2a] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage_in_the_Republic_of_Ireland" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage_in_the_Repub...</a><p>[2b] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recognition_of_same-sex_unions_in_Poland" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recognition_of_same-sex_unions...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index</a><p>[4] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index</a><p>[5] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Freedom_Index" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Freedom_Index</a><p>[6] <a href="https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-cp8iter/p8iter/p8rrc/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-cp8iter/p...</a><p>( Though 78% self-report as Catholic only 35% attend Church on a weekly basis which I would argue is a truer measure of religiosity. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_Republic_of_Ireland" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_Republic_of_Ir...</a> )
The fact that Europe and it’s colonies (with around a tenth of the worlds population) fill up half of the map hints at some Eurocentrism. Shoving all of Asia and all of Africa into tiny equally sized corners is quite strange.