systemity

Part IIb. Map of civilization thrust.
Part IIa. The map of civilization thrust (systemity.livejournal.com/631581.html)
Part I. All people are equal but some are more equal (systemity.livejournal.com/631478.html)

The causes of such a state of affairs are too complex and entangled, and, therefore, referring to them can hardly be helpful in explaining of the above-shown grouping. It seems to me that by looking at the map of the grouping of the 220 countries, even those who tend to explain all the problems of the mankind by social inequality created by evil imperialists, even the most hopelessly leftist theoreticians cannot help but think that not everything in the world can be easily explained. Take, for instance, the countries that formerly were the USSR republics: Georgia, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Moldova, Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia are in the "green" group; Armenia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Kyrgyzstan fall into the intermediary group; and Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan belong to the Uganda group. All of these countries just recently -- by historical standards -- were parts of one state and were quite securely closed for contacts with other countries.

All of the countries with Arab populations (except for Tunisia and Lebanon) belong to the Uganda group. One can rightly point out that Arabs invented alcohol distillation, and were good doctors and astronomers a thousand years ago. However, I am speaking about the past one hundred years and would be happy to hear facts that could disprove the statement that the contribution of the "reds" to development of the human civilization is infinitesimal. And I am not speaking of precision bombing, astronautics, or unmanned aircraft systems. I am speaking of anything that makes human life easier, helps women in their daily routine as they not only give birth to new members of the human society but also take on the burden of everyday life duties.

And, finally, a few words about the third, intermediary, group. What is notable first of all -- and this is my personal opinion -- the people of these countries are hard-working and diligent. That could explain why the countries of the "yellow" group are so good in adopting the new technologies of the "greens" and are demonstrating exceptionally high industrial growth rates as of lately. Three of the BRIC countries belong to the intermediary group. Russia's being a BRIC country is not a reflection of growth but rather a slowdown as a consequence of the communist regime due to which the former USSR republics are falling behind the major countries of the "green" group.

The graph in Fig. 6 shows that the grouping demonstrated by me perfectly correlates with the fertility indices of the countries of the three groups, which I will further discuss. What strikes most is the regional character of the grouping of the countries on the map of the "civilization thrust". The question of how the birth rates are so consistent on vast territories of the Earth is very interesting in itself. Looking at the map, one would certainly think that there must be a certain mysterious geographical factor at play. The regional character of the grouping of the countries points to the same.

Fig. 6. Correlation between fertility indices and the grouping of the countries based on their population pyramids.

Another interesting fact is that, with the exception of Turkey, Indonesia, Azerbaijan, and Albania, most of the Islamic countries belong to the Uganda group. For example, Pakistan and Bangladesh are "red", whereas the adjacent and historically related India belongs to the intermediary group. Among the Central Asian republics of the former USSR, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan are "red", whereas Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, as well as China, belong to the intermediary group.

Also, there is evidently the ethnic factor involved: countries with Chinese population -- China, Taiwan, Singapore and Macao -- belong to the intermediary group. Only Hong Kong, where the influence of the UK government had been stronger than in Singapore, belongs to the "green" group. The intermediary group includes also Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, Burma, Sri Lanka, India, Indonesia, and both North and South Korea, despite that economically and technologically these two countries are drastically different. Laos and Cambodia, which are very similar and are surrounded by the intermediary group countries, belong to the "red" group. Of the three Caucasian republics, Georgia belongs to the Monaco group, whereas Armenia and Azerbaijan belong to the "yellow" group.

It seems that the very nature of the obtained grouping based on the population pyramids must be of interest to a wide range of specialists. The inverse proportional dependence between income, standard of living and IQ, on the one hand, and fertility index, on the other, was noted in many papers. The map demonstrated in this work provides the possibility of a new approach to the assessment of the role of demographic factor in the current state of populations of various countries. Rather than using the data on IQ and fertility indices, one can use the commonly known generalized social, political, economic and other characteristics of the countries that are the elements of the self-organizing system represented by the global population.

Thus, although the grouping of 220 countries demonstrated in this work is based on such a purely demographic parameter as population pyramid, and although the demonstrated grouping has a clearly regional character, many of the problems can be understood only in connection with the historical development of certain countries. There is no doubt that the obtained grouping should be considered in dynamics. A study of a long-term dynamics of the grouping could provide vast and interesting information.

The dynamics of intergroup transitions of the countries can be analyzed by the methods used in this work. Mutual positions of the countries are tied to coefficients of their dissimilarity to the model pyramid EX30 which remains unchanged. The computer program MeaningFinder provides a whole set of techniques for revealing the groupings. In this study, in particular, the grouping was determined based on the cooperativity coefficient which was computed based on 7,500 values describing the population pyramids of 220 countries.

For the same purpose, one can use, for instance, data that are corrected by taking into account the share of a given country's population in the global population. One can add the data on mortality, migration, GDP, literacy, etc. The main principle of the described method of grouping is distribution by the dissimilarity coefficient. The above-shown map could be presented not just in three colors but in various shades of the three colors, depending on degrees of dissimilarity to the model pyramid EX30. That would not change the resulting grouping of the countries but would demonstrate not only differences but also similarities between individual countries.

The described method can be used for comparative analysis of particular regions, as was shown on the example of Israel, West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The interactive map was created by my co-author in development of MeaningFinder, Oleg Rogachev.

References:
[1] L. Andreev. Unsupervised automated hierarchical data clustering based on simulation of a similarity matrix evolution. U.S. Patent 6,640,227 (2003)
[2] L.Andreev/ High-dimensional data clustering with the use of hybrid similarity matrices. U.S. Patent 7,003,509 (2006)
[3] L.Andreev and M.Andreev. Method and computer-based system for non-propabilistic hypothesis generation and verification/ U.S. Patent 7,062,508 (2006)