From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed Oct 16 2002 - 16:31:02 MDT
A preliminary note:
Being a data-glutton, I played around with Hofstede's cultural
dimensions (taken from
http://www.stuart.iit.edu/courses/mgt581/filespdf/numbers.pdf) and the
UNDP technology achievement index
(http://www.undp.org/hdr2001/techindex.pdf). There is a reasonably
strong correlation (0.66) between the individualism score and the tech
score, and a negative correlation (-0.57) between the power distance
score and tech. A surprisingly weak negative correlation with
uncertainty avoidance (-0.14) - I would have thought that factor
affected creativity much more.
This is just a first step, and doesn't show any causation of course.
Maybe high tech environments make societies more individualistic and
less hierarchical, maybe collectivist and hierarchical environments
seldom innovate or adopt new technology, or there are deeper factors
affecting both (or a combination of all).
If technology tends to drive societies towards centralisation, then
societies that has had technology for a long time would be more
centralized than others (possibly confounded by a higher rate of
innovation in more decentralized societies). But instead the new tech
nations like Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Japan appear more
centralized than old tech nations like the US, Britain and Sweden; there
are also some highly centralized old tech nations like France.
In the context of this debate I would like to dig up measures of how
centralized power actually is, rather than how the culture works; I will
likely try using the Freedom House and Heritage Foundation indices to
get an impression, but I would love if there is some kind of
centralization index. I have also the World Values Survey to mix in, for
a true orgy in data mining. But now I have to sleep.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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