NS Stats - Trends, Correlations, Anti-Correlations, Oh My!

[Nouveau Yathrib]

As requested, Environmental Beauty (EB) vs Economic Freedom (EF)! Interesting trends all around, let's get to it!

So... what can we see here? The data collected would indicate that there are just a lot more capitalist (EF > 0) nations than the socialist ones, at least going by the Rand Index. Apart from the outlier being Tzo (the one with 22580.84 on EB), there are a fair share of capitalist and socialist nations with good or bad environments. With that said, the more socialist countries (negative EF) tends to work better with the EB, attributing to perhaps not letting the businesses trash the place too hard. It's all about being moderate for these two trends. Don't be too free, or too communist either. If you are too free, chances are good that you are letting businesses do whatever they want with little to no care for the environments. The socialist ones fare better, but they will drop their EB if their EF gets a little too low. Not as much as 100 EF nations, so the -100 EF nations can do well.

Here's a better Log-Linear graphs of the Socialist and Capitalist nations, separately.

Socialist (-100 <= EF <= 0).
(Image)


Capitalist (0 <= EF <= 100)
(Image)

The cluster of High EB nations peaks at a higher value for Capitalist nations than Socialist nations. Excluding outliers, the highest EB socialist nations (between -90.0 and -60.0 EF) peak at ~5000, while the highest EB capitalist nations (between 20.0 and 40.0 EF) peak at ~7000. The higher EB nations are statistically more likely to have market-based economies and not central planning. Although within each group, higher EF is correlated with lower EB.

[Trotterdam]

0.0 to 33.0 EF = social democracy

You know, except that you can have this on non-democratic nations.

(I get your point though.)

[Valentine Z]

Ahh right, I know about that bit. I figured that it will be easier to classify them as socialist or capitalist, but yeah, the smaller bits will make sense. Still, something to think about.

@CWA: That might be a little tedious, because I didn't have the government expenditure data with me. With that said, let me see what I can do! ^^ This is going to be a long-term stuff, anyway, so... I'll try to get to it eventually. I will still put it under consideration and will not drop it. Just... I will try to see if I can actually get the data I need.

I assume you are talking about this? https://www.nationstates.net/nation=valentine_z/detail=economy

[Valentine Z]

As requested, here it is! Wealth Gap (WG) vs Economic Freedom (EF).

Linear-Linear:

Log-Linear:

As expected, you can see that the more Socialist and Communist nations tends to have narrower WGs compared to the ones that are very, very Capitalistic, or at least has a degree of freedom.

One thing to note is that it's not a continuous graph, or a total correlation. So... Being 0 on EF (neutral on Rand Index) will not guarantee you more WG compared to those with less than 0 EF. You can see the break where this happens. This might be either due to the nations that have played their cards right and balanced low WG with EF, or that they don't really answer issues that frequently, which is the case with Anarchy nations that has 1000+ WG and they didn't answer a single issue. You know those ones! Not necessarily a bad thing, because if they so much so as touch an issue, they will tank their stats. They have attained their maximum.

I used WG instead of Income Equality because of Aclion's request, and also because WG has a bigger range for me to play with a log graph. Income Equality will have a lot of Nations clustering at 90-100%, and the 2 decimal places are not too accurate when it comes to nations with wider Wealth Gaps.

In short: 1.00 Wealth Gap (Total equality) can seem to happen for small nations (I'll provide this later by filtering out the population), and the communist ones. But once you reach a certain threshold, there's no way for you to achieve an equality. A free business market means that some people will have to fall, unfortunately.

More graphs! Both of them are Log-Linear.

Filtered out to nations with > 10.000 billion population:

Filtered out to nations with < 100 million population:

[Valentine Z]

Okay, so regarding what CWA said...

My theory is that generally bigger governments will spend more all over, but some spending types are likely to be found more together, like military / police, and foreign aid / welfare, as your hardline right wingers tend to like spending on men in uniforms while your bleeding heart liberals love the government to place money in upturned palms.

I'd suggest that it might be interesting to look at percentages spent on each department, and to see if there's any departments that tend to correlate in spending. Percentages will mean more than absolute amounts, as bigger nations will tend to spend more on all departments anyway, probably.

Anyway you can do something like that?

That can actually be done! ^^ I found the govt public shard which basically returns back the % of the government expenditure. Writing the code might be a little tricky to account for 0% categories not being inside, but I'll see what I can do!

[Valentine Z]

After a short delay, we are back on regular programming! Here's the next correlation analysis - Average Income vs Wealth Gap! Average Income, not Average Disposable Income (at least, not yet!)

Linear-Linear:

Log-Log:

Linear-Log:

Log-Linear:

All-in-all, I will say that this is not too bad for me to analyse. It's always crowded at the 1 < WG < 10 mark, which is why I actually zoomed in at the log bit in order to get a better view. Some of the things to note. These statistics are based on my data, not on the global average you see on the website (on the graphs):

• The lowest Average Income is 1900.12 Standard Monetary Units, at 2.80 WG.
• The highest Average Income is 1,036,442.78 SMU, at 302.94 WG.
• The average Average Income is 78739.79 SMU, and the average WG is 13.23 (the rich earns 13.23 times as much as the poor).

For smaller WGs, the average income has a wider range. There are a few nations that break the norm, but the lower ceiling, so to speak, seems to have a ln (natural log) shape of some sort. Ignoring those outliers, as the WG increases, the minimum Average Income possible increases at a certain rate... which I am not very sure. It just has a (ln x) look on the log-log graph, so the min. Average Income increases, but at a rate that I am cranking my brain to work on.

[Valentine Z]

Here's the next trend analysis - Culture vs Weather! For this one, I remembered that it used to be a little anti-correlated. Not heavily, but it's just hinted. So... if you have good culture, you will have very poor weather. Maybe like the RL Britain? Anyway, here it is!

Linear-Linear:

I'm only doing Linear-Linear this time because there are a huge range of values that span into the negative values, and of course, it won't make too much sense and will complicate things if I am going for imaginary numbers on top of real numbers for negative logarithms.

What do we see here? There is a very small correlation - as Weather increases, so does Culture, and so on. There are many nations that break this trend, such as:

• Enrichment: 4747 Weather, but -357 Culture.
• Edgemaster: -8708 Weather, but 116 Culture.

With a change from the Beta a while back, the trends have changed, so... it's not necessary that they are anti-correlated, but there are still nations around that has very high Weather and very low Culture, or very high Culture and very low Culture.

[Trotterdam]

Culture and Weather are definitely anti-correlated in the game mechanics, I can see this from my data on issue effects. The lack of apparent correlation in nation data must be because factors other than Culture tend to have a bigger effect on Weather, so that the effect of Culture is lost among the noise. The very minor positive rather than negative correlation you discover is particularly interesting, and suggests a psychological trend where players who favor Culture also favor things which are good for Weather, despite this not being coded into the game mechanics (probably because both Culture and Weather are considered "good things", so good nations promote them while deliberately-terrible nations stamp them out, and only a limited number of issues affect Culture so the damage it can do to Weather is limited, while there are several other "good thing" stats that do have a positive correlation with Weather).

[Valentine Z]

Culture and Weather are definitely anti-correlated in the game mechanics, I can see this from my data on issue effects. The lack of apparent correlation in nation data must be because factors other than Culture tend to have a bigger effect on Weather, so that the effect of Culture is lost among the noise. The very minor positive rather than negative correlation you discover is particularly interesting, and suggests a psychological trend where players who favor Culture also favor things which are good for Weather, despite this not being coded into the game mechanics (probably because both Culture and Weather are considered "good things", so good nations promote them while deliberately-terrible nations stamp them out, and only a limited number of issues affect Culture so the damage it can do to Weather is limited, while there are several other "good thing" stats that do have a positive correlation with Weather).

That's good to hear, and a correction on my part and belief. I was under the impression that a Beta while back changed this, so there's that.

Indeed, the positive correlation is very, very minor. It doesn't even follow that well, but there is a very slight increase overall in Culture as Weather increases. Perhaps it is just like me, and many other nations, then. I believe that both the Weather and the Culture are important, and also because of the care for the environment, so that environmental friendliness perhaps might have boosted the Weather one way or another, while the decrements from the Culture increments are countered.

[Valentine Z]

The next one on our list is... Crime vs Civil Rights!

Linear-Linear:

Log-Log:

Log-Linear:

Linear-Log:

So... there seems to be a very, very small positive correlation between Crime and Civil Rights, at first glance. The two seems to be connected in some way, but then again, nations differ on what is the definition of crime ICly. Maybe for one nation, weed is legal, but for the other, it's outlawed and even possessing it is a crime. It could go that way.

Other than the very small positive correlation, there is also the trend that as your Civil Rights increase, there seems to be more variation and range on the number of crimes committed in a country. The dictatorships, or the ones with very low Civil Rights managed to keep their crime rates low, while those on the other end has a lot more crimes going on, since more civil rights generally means that they can do what WA thinks is a crime. Perhaps stealing is not a crime in an anarchy, but it's still is under the WA definitions? That's my best guess, anyway! ^^

Of course, having a very high CR (Civil Rights) doesn't mean high crime rates. From the data appended, Edgemaster has the highest crime rates at 300.63, but only with 63.90 CR. As a side note, the nation with the lowest Crime Rate is Tzo with a whopping 75.67 Civil Rights, and at the same time having 0.96 crimes per hour. What was not included is Cashdeer, who is currently (as of the time of this writing) to be the 1st nation in Crime Rates with a whopping 524.15 crimes per hour, with the Civil Rights of 90.50. Perhaps in the future, after some more Betas are implemented, I will add more nations.

In conclusion? There seems to be a small degree of Civil Rights playing the part in affecting crime rates, but they are not that severe. The Linear trendline is there just to show that Excel thinks that there is a very, very small positive correlation going on. Increased Civil Rights won't necessarily increase Crime, but they could lead your nation to have a more flexible crime rate.

[Sacara]

I think it would neat to see Public Education vs Intelligence.

[East Gondwana]

I'd be interested to see HDI vs Taxation

[Valentine Z]

I will add those two into queue! Thanks for the suggestions! ^^

As a reminder that this is a long-term project, so your trend suggestions will be revisited again with the new data if you want to. Because the NS Stats are always changing, and there are new Betas and other things along the way that will change the trends. For the third trawl, maybe on 14th Feb or so, my target will be 30k nations, or 40k if I am feeling daring.

In other words, there will be a lot of things to talk about! :3

[Angshire]

In addition to the Public Services I've announced earlier, I would love to see the following:

1.) Public Healthcare vs Health
2.) Law Enforcement vs Crime
3.) Law Enforcement vs Defense Forces
4.) Crime vs Safety

[Valentine Z]

In addition to the Public Services I've announced earlier, I would love to see the following:

1.) Public Healthcare vs Health
2.) Law Enforcement vs Crime
3.) Law Enforcement vs Defense Forces
4.) Crime vs Safety

Ooh, interesting choices! Added them all into the queue! 1) already exists, so... it'll be put there soon as well. :3

[Ransium]

Culture and Weather are definitely anti-correlated in the game mechanics, I can see this from my data on issue effects. The lack of apparent correlation in nation data must be because factors other than Culture tend to have a bigger effect on Weather, so that the effect of Culture is lost among the noise. The very minor positive rather than negative correlation you discover is particularly interesting, and suggests a psychological trend where players who favor Culture also favor things which are good for Weather, despite this not being coded into the game mechanics (probably because both Culture and Weather are considered "good things", so good nations promote them while deliberately-terrible nations stamp them out, and only a limited number of issues affect Culture so the damage it can do to Weather is limited, while there are several other "good thing" stats that do have a positive correlation with Weather).

This is definitely true, I bet of the top 100 nations for weather 90% are in the top 1% for culture as well. A lot of them are also not maximizing another stat that would increase weather but isn't associated with "good things". I'm amazed more people don't game weather, using your tool alone it would be trivial to get in the top 100 nations in like a year and half. If I hadn't been made staff and stopped answering issues regularly for a while I'd probably have the #1 badge for weather.

[Trotterdam]

I don't care that much about weather. It's nice to have, but I'm trying to make a nation that's good across-the-board, not one that maximizes one thing to the exclusion of everything else. Plus, the game's simplistic "sunny weather is better" interpretation is questionable anyway. Farmers need rain occasionally, and thunderstorms are cool, and kids like playing in the snow.

[Pangurstan]

Can you do arms manufacturing vs defense forces?

[Valentine Z]

Can you do arms manufacturing vs defense forces?

Added that into the queue! ^^

[Valentine Z]

And now for another one! Public Education vs Public Healthcare!

Linear-Linear (Many graphs and zooms):

Log-Log:

Linear-Linear (w/ Linear Correlation Trend Line):

This time, there are many, many Linear-Linear graphs and I didn't bother with the Log-Linear or Linear-Log because of the way the negative values are there. Also because the Log-Log graph makes it pretty clean and clear this time! It kinda looks like a lobster, hehe.

That aside, how does it look? Well, as you can probably see, there is a pretty strong correlation between the two things. Education and Healthcare does go hand-in-hand. A government that spends on healthcare, will also spend quite a lot on education, and vice versa.

The Top 1% badge, by my definition, is when your nation is < 1700th for the World Rank.

For Public Education:

• 250 out of the 19525 nations I have trawled through has < 1700th World Rank.
• Out of these 250 nations, the Lowest score is 20308.80, which goes to Northern African Sahara.
• The Highest score is 90846.10, which goes to Blogotopia. The nation has been 1st in World Rank at that time, and is still is now!
• 177 out of these 250 nations have < 1700th World Rank for Public Healthcare as well!

For Public Healthcare:

• 251 out of the 19525 nations I have trawled through has < 1700th World Rank.
• Out of these 251 nations, the Lowest score is 11163.64, which goes to Plembobria.
• The Highest score is 36351.24, which goes to Yuumura Kirika. The nation has been 7th in World Rank at that time, they are 6th now.

But wait, there are exceptions and special notes!

• Ransium: 28439.9 for Public Healthcare, BUT -10.95 for Public Education! So Healthcare is taken care of by the government, but I reckon that there are a lot of private schools.
• So is this nation called Isbjorn Maerenne Bava Paerani. 14010.03 for Public Healthcare, BUT -8.94 for Public Education.
• The opposite also works that way. Two nations have good Public Education, but absolute nothing for Public Healthcare - Faizarimba and Nuweland. 20829.00 Public Education and -5.48 Public Healthcare for the former; 27355.40 Public Education and -37.15 Public Healthcare for the latter. Public Healthcare, that's good and all! But pay out of your nose for education.
• There are 24 nations that are < 0 for Public Healthcare AND Public Education. The lowest goes to Northern Borland, with -105.64 Public Education, and -117.94 Public Healthcare.

[Valentine Z]

Culture and Weather are definitely anti-correlated in the game mechanics, I can see this from my data on issue effects. The lack of apparent correlation in nation data must be because factors other than Culture tend to have a bigger effect on Weather, so that the effect of Culture is lost among the noise. The very minor positive rather than negative correlation you discover is particularly interesting, and suggests a psychological trend where players who favor Culture also favor things which are good for Weather, despite this not being coded into the game mechanics (probably because both Culture and Weather are considered "good things", so good nations promote them while deliberately-terrible nations stamp them out, and only a limited number of issues affect Culture so the damage it can do to Weather is limited, while there are several other "good thing" stats that do have a positive correlation with Weather).

This is definitely true, I bet of the top 100 nations for weather 90% are in the top 1% for culture as well. A lot of them are also not maximizing another stat that would increase weather but isn't associated with "good things". I'm amazed more people don't game weather, using your tool alone it would be trivial to get in the top 100 nations in like a year and half. If I hadn't been made staff and stopped answering issues regularly for a while I'd probably have the #1 badge for weather.

Just for the fun of it, I actually filtered and see what's what. So I first filtered < 100th World Rank for Culture. There are 14 of these nations in my data trawl. The Weather fluctuates a lot here for these 14 nations that has Top 100 Culture.

• Blogotopia is 97th for Weather at 1706.
• Independent Planets is 13399th for Weather at 168.
• Tzo is 11th for Weather at 3541.
• Yaorozu is 97th for Weather at 2967.
• Arithei is 167th for Weather at 1327.
• Brillnuck is 168095th for Weather at -223.
• Canterburie is 167866th for Weather at -201.
• Cyrenean is 53rd for Weather at 2044.
• Lamborghini Murcielago is 162719th for Weather at 5.
• Safj is 33rd for Weather at 2386.
• Snorlaxia is 170600th for Weather at -2170.
• The Soylent Green Party is 170026th for Weather at -840.
• Troltovia is 54th for Weather at 2004.
• Woolitania is 2228th for Weather at 405.

So... there are two ends of it! ^^ Good Culture, Good Weather. Good Culture, Awful Weather.

[Bears Armed]

This is definitely true, I bet of the top 100 nations for weather 90% are in the top 1% for culture as well. A lot of them are also not maximizing another stat that would increase weather but isn't associated with "good things". I'm amazed more people don't game weather, using your tool alone it would be trivial to get in the top 100 nations in like a year and half. If I hadn't been made staff and stopped answering issues regularly for a while I'd probably have the #1 badge for weather.

Just for the fun of it, I actually filtered and see what's what. So I first filtered < 100th World Rank for Culture. There are 14 of these nations in my data trawl. The Weather fluctuates a lot here for these 14 nations that has Top 100 Culture.

• Blogotopia is 97th for Weather at 1706.
• Independent Planets is 13399th for Weather at 168.
• Tzo is 11th for Weather at 3541.
• Yaorozu is 97th for Weather at 2967.
• Arithei is 167th for Weather at 1327.
• Brillnuck is 168095th for Weather at -223.
• Canterburie is 167866th for Weather at -201.
• Cyrenean is 53rd for Weather at 2044.
• Lamborghini Murcielago is 162719th for Weather at 5.
• Safj is 33rd for Weather at 2386.
• Snorlaxia is 170600th for Weather at -2170.
• The Soylent Green Party is 170026th for Weather at -840.
• Troltovia is 54th for Weather at 2004.
• Woolitania is 2228th for Weather at 405.

So... there are two ends of it! ^^ Good Culture, Good Weather. Good Culture, Awful Weather.

Here's another data point for the 'Good Culture' Awful Weather' end of it...

Bears Armed is 13th for Culture at 1’130, and 160’627th for Weather, at -121.00… and that’s with Environmental Beauty (which I’d expect to be one of the other factors affecting Weather) 660th at 4’917.53…

[Marxist Germany]

Just for the fun of it, I actually filtered and see what's what. So I first filtered < 100th World Rank for Culture. There are 14 of these nations in my data trawl. The Weather fluctuates a lot here for these 14 nations that has Top 100 Culture.

• Blogotopia is 97th for Weather at 1706.
• Independent Planets is 13399th for Weather at 168.
• Tzo is 11th for Weather at 3541.
• Yaorozu is 97th for Weather at 2967.
• Arithei is 167th for Weather at 1327.
• Brillnuck is 168095th for Weather at -223.
• Canterburie is 167866th for Weather at -201.
• Cyrenean is 53rd for Weather at 2044.
• Lamborghini Murcielago is 162719th for Weather at 5.
• Safj is 33rd for Weather at 2386.
• Snorlaxia is 170600th for Weather at -2170.
• The Soylent Green Party is 170026th for Weather at -840.
• Troltovia is 54th for Weather at 2004.
• Woolitania is 2228th for Weather at 405.

So... there are two ends of it! ^^ Good Culture, Good Weather. Good Culture, Awful Weather.

Here's another data point for the 'Good Culture' Awful Weather' end of it...

Bears Armed is 13th for Culture at 1’130, and 160’627th for Weather, at -121.00… and that’s with Environmental Beauty (which I’d expect to be one of the other factors affecting Weather) 660th at 4’917.53…

Bears don't like sunshine.

[Pangurstan]

Here's another data point for the 'Good Culture' Awful Weather' end of it...

Bears Armed is 13th for Culture at 1’130, and 160’627th for Weather, at -121.00… and that’s with Environmental Beauty (which I’d expect to be one of the other factors affecting Weather) 660th at 4’917.53…

Bears don't like sunshine.

What about sun bears?

[Trotterdam]

What about sun bears?

They live in the rainforest, so ironically, they might not see that much sun.