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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   34394 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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Percentage of European ancestry is a good predictor of HDI scores in Central- and South America. I haven't run any numbers, but that's the impression I get from glancing at two Wikipedia maps:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3f/European_Ancestry_Large.svg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3d/2021-22_UN_Human_Development_Report.svg

(French Guyana just gets the HDI of France, and should be discounted.)

I find this interesting, because I'd always just assumed that South America was too thoroughly mixed, both genetically and culturally, with Europe for any remaining discrepancies to make much of a difference.

Yesterday, I watched a documentary about Costa Rica (which I knew nothing about) which claimed it has a very high life expectancy. While trying to figure out what made them different from neighboring countries, I noticed most of the people there had European facial features. I'd never considered that kind of correlation in Central- and South American countries before.

Ultimately, the observation basically rests on Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Costa Rica. Venezuela and Panama (and maybe Colombia?) go against the grain. The rest are all just generally low-European percentage and low HDI score.

Doesn’t the divide between Mexican states kind of tell the same story?

The biggest caveat is that the European Ancestry data that the map is based on might not be very accurate. It's largely based on self-identification, which is hard, because most of Central- and South America are mixed European and Native. The best would be data from DNA studies that estimate percentage of DNA from Europe. The data surely already exists somewhere.

--

Also, switching out HDI score for GDP per capita also works pretty well:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/IMF_GDP_per_capita_by_country_%28Oct_2022%29.png

Here's a map someone posted at 23andme subreddit (on the basis of other data than 23andme, mind, which would probably be a slanted source.)

Thanks! In that map, it looks like Argentina and Chile doesn't really have any more European ancestry than Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. That would completely undermine the correlation.

Poor administration is a plausible reason, no?

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