Wealth of Nations...

Megan McArdle posted the map at right (along with two other related and equally interesting maps) a couple days ago. Her post is mainly concerned with the indisputable fact that the wealthiest countries are all either part of the English-speaking world (the “Anglosphere”) or are near them.

First a word about this map (which you can click to enlarge): the darker the shade on the map, the more GDP per capita. The latter is a simple calculation: take the total value of all goods and services produced in a country (the Gross Domestic Product, or GDP) and divide it by the number of people who live in that country. The scale is not linear – look carefully at the numbers on the legend.

Something else jumped out at me from this map: many of the “high-tension” parts of the world are around places where there are large disparities in GDP per capita: U.S. and Mexico, Israel and its neighbors, Europe and the Balkans, Nepal and China, etc. Is all conflict essentially economic? Or is economic disparity a prerequisite for violent conflict? Or is it just coincidence?