That's not less stupid than the other statement. It's like looking at your shadow at sunset and thinking, "Wow, I never realized I was 20 feet tall."
Quite the opposite, no? It's like spending your whole life looking at only your evening shadow (Hello, Plato) and then seeing yourself in a good mirror and realising your actual height relative to the world around you for the first time.
That’s odd. Did you think land mass was somehow really important?
Did you ever check out how small Britain or Spain or Portugal or Netherlands were to the size of their empire.
Do you now think that Indonesia is more important because of its size?
I would expect that revelations about population would be more worldview adjusting (Nigeria and Indonesia are so huge).
Importance should change depending on context.
Sure, you are definitely allowed to say that a certain metric (i.e. population size or density) has more practical applications and provides better signal for “blah blah”.
But I’m not discussing “blah blah”.
I commented that it was curious that someone would think size is so important that learning the true size of countries would change their world view. In that land mass isn’t usually very important for political or cultural significance (eg, Canada is huge and that doesn’t make it important, Russia is important not because of its size, etc etc).
If it wasn't, why was so much of history spent fighting over it?
No one fought much over Canada and Siberia and they are huge.
Yes. That and population. Generally, the larger and more populous countries tend to be the most powerful and influential.
> Did you ever check out how small Britain or Spain or Portugal or Netherlands were to the size of their empire.
Ever wonder why britain, spain, portugal and netherlands expanded their landmass by creating their empires? Ever wonder why britain, spain, portugal and netherlands lost their power and influence when they lost their empires and landmass?
> Do you now think that Indonesia is more important because of its size?
Yes along with other reasons - population, geographical location, etc.
But this is obviously not true. Just look at the list of top 10 by GDP and check out how many of them are relatively small.
I mean you have to have natural resources and can’t be tiny, but it’s not like Germany and Japan are powerful because of their landmass.
I think judging countries by their size is a mistake in rationality and people shouldn’t do that. It’s only silly people who look at Greenland on a Mercator map and think that they are powerful based on size.
There absolutely is a correlation between land mass and nominal GDP.
| name | gdp_pos | gdp | land_pos | land |
|----------------|---------|----------|----------|---------|
| United States | 1 | 26854599 | 4 | 9147593 |
| China | 2 | 19373586 | 3 | 9596961 |
| Japan | 3 | 4409738 | 62 | 377976 |
| Germany | 4 | 4308854 | 63 | 357114 |
| India | 5 | 3736882 | 7 | 3287263 |
| United Kingdom | 6 | 3158938 | 79 | 242495 |
| France | 7 | 2923489 | 49 | 543940 |
| Italy | 8 | 2169745 | 72 | 301339 |
| Canada | 9 | 2089672 | 2 | 9984670 |
| Brazil | 10 | 2081235 | 5 | 8515767 |
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
I guarantee that if you plot the countries of the world by GDP and area, you will see a trend line.
It also makes sense. More area = higher chance of larger population and more natural resources. And more space to carry out economic activities with said people and resources.
Edit: I just queried Wolfram Alpha about this. It generated a plot for me, which shows what I expected. Check it out: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=list+of+countries+with+...
Edit2: bonus feature, GPT-4 wrote me a script to plot this also, check it out: https://chat.openai.com/share/ffa45c61-8b7a-44e1-b757-041f31...
There is clearly a correlation, even on linear. It's a little messy, but it's undeniably there.
The starting point for this discussion was about the relationship between a country's size and population and it's power and influence. The correlation between area and GDP demonstrates that there is a meaningful relationship.
Btw, what is your specific complaint about a log-log plot? Country data points for area and GDP span many orders of magnitude, which makes it harder to visualize any patterns on a linear plot.
I also don't understand your point about the dispersion. The correlation and trend is pretty clear. No one said the correlation was 99%.
Edit: I've calculated Pearson's correlation coefficient for this data [1]. The result is 0.82, which indicates a strong positive correlation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearson_correlation_coefficien...
datamash gave me 0.52 for Pearson. Which is "eh, maybe".
I've reproduced dwaltrib's results using World Bank data on 251 countries, and I get a Pearson's r of 0.82 and a p value of 5.6e-61 (!). I.e. a strong correlation, with high confidence. It makes sense too -- larger countries generally have more people, and more people generally generate more economic activity.
Code if you want to try yourself:
import pandas as pd
gdp = pd.read_csv("~/Downloads/API_NY.GDP.MKTP.CD_DS2_en_csv_v2_5551501.csv").set_index("Country Name")
land_area = pd.read_csv("~/Downloads/API_AG.LND.TOTL.K2_DS2_en_csv_v2_5552158.csv").set_index("Country Name")
gdp["GDP"] = gdp["2020"]
gdp["Land"] = land_area["2020"]
gdp = gdp.dropna(subset=["GDP", "Land"])
from scipy import stats
print(stats.pearsonr(gdp.Land, gdp.GDP))
#+RESULTS: : PearsonRResult(statistic=0.8151313879150333, pvalue=5.621180589722219e-61)
It is obviously true. The five permanent security council members are US, China, Russia, UK and France. US, China and Russia are obviously gigantic. UK is gigantic via its ties to Canada, Australia, NZ. After all the silly monarch of britain is the head of state of all these nations. And France has a gigantic empire still. Go check out their EEZ.
> but it’s not like Germany and Japan are powerful because of their landmass.
Germany and Japan aren't powerful. Powerful nations aren't occupied by a foreign power. Germany and Japan are extraordinarly weak. Their economic well being is entirely dependent on the generosity of another nation.
There is a reason why Germany and Japan tried to expand their territories in ww2. They failed and they have to live with the consequences.
> I think judging countries by their size is a mistake in rationality and people shouldn’t do that.
Sure. Landmass by itself isn't everything. As I said, you have to factor in population, quality of land, ports, neighbors, etc.
> It’s only silly people who look at Greenland on a Mercator map and think that they are powerful based on size.
You quoted "the larger and more populous countries tend to be the most powerful and influential."
Do you know what populous means? It's silly to quote something and not understand it.
Can you elaborate on that ?
Did you think bigger = better ?
On what are you basing it?
IME, almost nobody cares. Even folks who like maps (e.g. me) "don't care" in most cases, because flat maps will have distortions.
AFAICT, the people who really care about these distortions are folks who have political agendas and like to sling ad hominems around, such as "Folks who don't care are morons or racists."
So again:
> But a lot of the “I don’t care” group overlaps with the “Africa is a country” group.
On what are you basing that?
https://itsoktobewhite.quora.com/
On Quora, there’s a “group” sort of like a subreddit titled “It’s OK to be White”. There’s about 35k people who follow it. Their mission is to “uplift White cultures and oppose anti-White racism”.
Like I already said in my previous comment (so you didn’t need to ask twice what I was basing it off of), people often post map distortion memes on Quora and these other people from that group come out of the woodworks to complain. These memes aren’t even posted in that group. And I wish I could say that it’s just these weirdos on Quora that act like this. But no. I’ve seen it on Instagram. On Facebook. I’ve heard it in real life. It’s a thing that bothers a certain demographic of people. While it’s not a “major” thing and shouldn’t matter, it’s still a thing that I tend to see often.
I see there’s miscommunication here though. I do agree with you that most people “don’t care”. That’s the phrase we have been using. What you are saying and what I also believe is that most people are “map agnostic” for lack of a better phrase. They don’t care in that sense. Like life is too short. It’s just a map.
But when I used the phrase “don’t care” and added underscores around it and the words “at all” in my comments yesterday, I was referring to people who have _strong_ and _negative_ opinions about not caring.
For example, OP said that he was _constantly amazed_. And the other language he used evoked that he was “flabbergasted” that people care about map distortions. (Do you see how this is a different definition of “don’t care”?)
The language he was using and the emotions involved “mirrored” the language and emotions that I see on Quora and hear in real life from that specific group of people.
You’re right. I don’t have any concrete data or surveys or experiments or a sentiment analysis to show that those groups overlap. I was just basing it off of being alive for 30+ years, living in different countries, having a brain, etc.
(Also, there’s nothing wrong with calling someone a moron and/or a racist lol. The two groups usually overlap. Oops I did it again!)
Hmm. That’s not usually how the discourse goes.
It’s never “wow, Country X is actually smaller than Country Y. That’s terrible.”
It usually goes something like “wow, Country X is actually smaller than Country Y. This distorts our worldview and makes us think things we shouldn’t have thought. That’s terrible.”
FWIW, I was amazed in school when I saw a more accurate projection of the size of Europe. I mean, I _knew_ that it was tiny. But my thoughts about Europe definitely changed after seeing the other projection.
Similarly but not size-related, I was amazed to learn that some countries place Asia in the center (and the social/cultural implications of this).
I think you should be more amazed at people who _don’t_ care at _all _ about size. Sure, this group might include reasonable people like yourself who are knowledgeable about map distortions and trade offs. But a lot of the “I don’t care” group overlaps with the “Africa is a country” group. (Map size “memes” appear on Quora often and the degenerates come out of the woodworks to complain.)