by digby
I don’t know what the practical application of this bit of knowledge is, but it’s interesting. It’s the result of polling people around the world about what they fear the most:
Each country seems to equate the greatest threat to them or their region with the greatest global threat. So what this ends up showing, in effect, are the largest threats to each of the polled countries, according to popular opinion. And, in that sense, many of these are pretty good assessments.
Fairly developed countries, where economic inequality tends to be a problem — Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, and Argentina — tend to be worried about inequality. Ukraine and Pakistan see nukes as a big threat; both have gone to war relatively recently with adjacent nuclear powers (Russia and India). Japan, the only country to have been attacked by nuclear weapons, is still worried about them.
Middle Eastern countries tend to be more worried about ethnic and religious tensions. Rapidly developing but polluted East Asia is concerned about the environment (an unsurprising fact if you’ve visited Beijing or Manila). And sub-Saharan African countries, where HIV infection rates are by far the highest, often see AIDS and other diseases as the world’s biggest problems. People, it turns out, are pretty good at figuring out their country and region’s own biggest problems — but then they generalize those problems to the rest of the world.
The US is equally terrified of religious and ethnic hatred, inequality and nuclear weapons. We don’t seem to fear environmental problems or disease although I’d guess that’s changed in the last few weeks.
And the truth is that these are all problems for all of us.
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