One Way To Look At It

      When I mentioned the Nolan chart yesterday, I looked it up.  The Wikipedia article includes links to similar notions, one of which is the Inglehart-Welzel cultural map.

      This is not a guide to the best wine bars, bookstores, theatres and opera houses in an overlooked part of Switzerland.  Nope, it's a way to quantify cultures, and it seems to work pretty well. 

      Survey-based, it sorts the answers into a pair of numbers that represent "Traditional vs. Secular-Rational"  on one axis and "Survival vs. Self-Expression" on the other.  The latter is essentially a measure of prosperity and economic security: do people in that culture need to spend most of their time just getting by, or do they have time and money to go paint pictures or watch movies and so on?

      Critics argue that it's Western-biased, but the criteria are relatively objective and it does provide another way of looking at who we -- and our other neighbors on the planet -- are, and how that has shifted over time.