You have a fixed and narrow definition of what important means.

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’m curious why you think my definition of important is fixed and narrow. I didn’t define it and I agree that importance is a factor of context.

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).

Because you used phrases like “really important” and “more important”. It sounds very juvenile.

>That’s odd. Did you think land mass was somehow really important?

If it wasn't, why was so much of history spent fighting over it?

History was spent fighting over valuable resources, not sheer size.

No one fought much over Canada and Siberia and they are huge.

> That’s odd. Did you think land mass was somehow really important?

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.

> Generally, the larger and more populous countries tend to be the most powerful and influential.

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.

> 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.

There absolutely is a correlation between land mass and nominal GDP.

Assuming I've converted [1] and [2] correctly into this SQLite3 database and queried it correctly, not really, no.

    |      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 |

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...

The countries with the 2 highest GDPs, China and the US, are in the top 4 largest countries. India, #5 in GDP, is #7 in area.

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...

Seriously, a loglog plot? Even in that, there is a seriously wide dispersion to your correlation. And then look at the same data on a linear plot.

The linear plot in that Wolfram link is messed up. It doesn't show all the data (caps out at 800 billion GDP). Here's a corrected linear plot, from the script that I linked (commenting out the log-log scaling):

https://ibb.co/9bBgwH8

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...

> The result is 0.82, which indicates a strong positive correlation.

datamash gave me 0.52 for Pearson. Which is "eh, maybe".

That's weird, are you looking only at the top 10 countries?

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)

Thanks for double checking. I ran out of steam on the convo heh.

> But this is obviously not true.

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.