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July 15, 2010 at 1:58 pm
tgrass
I will not import this into CAD and find the center of mass of each country.
I will not import this into CAD and find the center of mass of each country.
I will not import this into CAD and find the center of mass of each country.
I will not import this into CAD and find the center of mass of each country.
July 15, 2010 at 4:00 pm
Mike
i did a quick and dirty calculation of the average ratio of the height of countries to the width (width measured as horizontal distance from easternmost point to westernmost point; height measured as vertical distance from northernmost point to southernmost point) for just the countries in asia… the mean ratio is about 1.05 (length:width) with a SD of .57. The median is about .89, suggesting that most countries are wider than they are tall, but the ones that are tall are very tall. For the purposes of these calculations I included islands or weird peninsulas when calculating height or width… perhaps without these (i.e., just looking at the main land mass of any given country), the numbers would change. Also, it would be interesting to do a similar calculation after performing slight rotations on all the countries so that their borders are mostly N-S or E-W (for example, japan’s ratio is about 1.24, but perhaps if we rotated it 30 degrees counterclockwise, it’d be closer to 3).
July 15, 2010 at 4:20 pm
Peter Klein
Have you seen the stuff by Alesina, Easterly, and Matuszeski on artificial borders? E.g.., http://ssrn.com/abstract=890593. Forget about height and width, what matters is straightness (and hence artificiality). I waxed profoundly about it before: http://organizationsandmarkets.com/2006/05/19/natural-and-artificial-states-and-firms/
July 15, 2010 at 4:40 pm
Braden
Jared Diamond, in _Guns, Germs, and Steel_, asserts that technology, particularly domesticated species, has traveled much more quickly from east to west than from north to south because of climate similarity. If you’re correct about civil wars, the cause may be the same.
July 15, 2010 at 5:10 pm
jeff
thank you. yes climate is what is in the back of my mind. it should matter most in the middle of the hemispheres where the temperature gradient is steepest. i.e. not in the tropics, not near the poles.
July 16, 2010 at 11:52 am
tgrass
Originally, Jeff, you posted: “Are civil wars more often North vs South than East vs West? Put differently, based on the boundaries that have survived until today, are countries, on average, wider than they are tall?”
It seems we should sample a broader population of nations. Wouldn’t we want to include all internal conflicts, specifically those that history now calls revolutions? The definition of civil war should be very explicit. As should the periods in history which should be included.
(My gut reaction is this is akin to environmental determinism, which was rejected at the beginning of last century. Which does not itself disprove the theory…)
July 18, 2010 at 1:07 am
WillJ
It doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense to try to answer the question “Are civil wars more often North vs South than East vs West?” by answering the question “based on the boundaries that have survived until today, are countries, on average, wider than they are tall?”
Boundaries are affected not only by civil wars, but also by wars between countries. And I’m no historian, but I believe there has been quite a bit more of the latter than the former.
This point, of course, is stupendously obvious, so tell me… am I missing something, or did Professor Ely just have an off day?
July 18, 2010 at 1:09 am
WillJ
[My comment above was meant as a reply to the thread in general, not to tgrass’s post specifically. Sorry for clicking the wrong button.]