The Walled World: a reason for wars? (in Debates)

What stands out for me on this is that China, Brazil, and Russia's income are still included in that 27%.

I don't think peace can exist in a world like this

If you look you can see the democratic countries in the green, while the oppressive ones are in the grey. With a few exceptions of course like India. Which will be in the green soon enough at the pace it is catching up.

Yet another example of socialism's failure worldwide.

so you are saying all the grey areas are socialist in nature?

a lot of the gray areas enjoyed European expansion and domination... (and American in some cases)

... but being subjugated and having your resources stripped surely isn't relevant here right?

The noted disparity in wealth here is largely a more recent development whereas human conflict is not.

Personally I would not be wagering on world peace for a long time with or without the information above.

For this map's info to be relevant...wouldn't you need to be able to compare it to similar ones from other, past centuries?

If you look you can see the democratic countries in green, some of whom support various oppressive countries in grey, whilst trying to change or undermine other regimes. Often those damn socialists.

To get any good analysis on the relationship between the above map and the occurrence of conflict one would indeed need some historical data on wealth disparity and the number/severity of conflicts at the same time.

Of course correlation is not causation so whether wealth disparity causes conflict, conflict causes wealth disparity, or something else causes both would still be unknown.

There can be no peace to begin with

This shows one important fact. Kids make an awful future.

Once I saw that C was listed as a heavily guarded border zone...
well that was the end of this map for me.
But then the map doesn't claim heavily guarded = actual attempt at keeping border control.


/me cackles until falling off the face of cb again.

And what's the lesson to learn here? We need to start heavily guarding Florida, and tell Europe and the Middle East to do the same! We can't have their gray people getting into our green areas!

On a little more serious of a note, this seems fishy. There are many very nice cities out there not included in whatever poll's rank of 50 best cities that are inside these 'gray' areas. Then, the green areas are just arbitrarily drawn around countries that got a city picked by whatever editor decided they were nice. I'm not geography whiz, but I imagine that a lot more walls and boundaries exist than those shown here anyways.

Also, let's not forget that these walls are not necessarily insurmountable, most countries have programs to let you pass them and visit or become citizens. I think peace can, and is, existing in this world.

Ok i cannot post html for some reason..but besides that point check out

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w

Watch the whole thing..i found it quite enjoyable. Towards the middle i would say it goes into how countries such as Korea have vastly improved over the past 50 years or so and how wealth is starting to spread out across the board.

ok i missed up and somehow i actually posted a link for the first time ever..gg double post

I also should have said this doesn't relate 100% to this "walled world" but it is still quite interesting to see.

How old is that map anyway, 3 to 4 years old ?
Because the Schengen borders are a wee bit different nowadays, and have been for the past 2 years (more or less).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)

The EU (taken as a singular entity) has roughly 30.2% of the world's GDP and roughly 7.4% of the world's population.

Of course, you will notice how the USA is listed as having 23.4% of the world's GDP (while barely having over 4.5% of the world's population), putting it as clear GDP leader if only individual countries are considered. However, a huge part of that GDP is largely _FICTIONAL_ since it only exists the same way Enron's profits existed, on paper (or, rather, electronically). This latest global economic crisis has had something to say about that.

Japan, on the other hand, has over 8.1% of the world's GDP and 1.9% of the world's population. Not sure how much of it is "real", but I tend to believe it's a far higher percentage than that of the USofA.

In stark contrast, China's GDP is estimated as roughly 7.2% of the world's GDP, but their population makes up 19.7% of the world's population. HOWEVER, one must not forget that while the USA is heavily into debt, with external debts almost surpassing the "on-paper" GDP (if it hasn't already surpassed it, either by growing debt or shrinking GDP)... and a huge portion of that external debt is held by China as USD reserves (as much as 10% of it, actually, and it's still growing). Sure, China could destabilize the USA economically, but fact remains, China's recent economic boom is heavily based on US consumerism practices (most of their exports go to the USA, and the largest portion of the rest to the EU), so they really have no good reason to even try to destabilize the US economy. Still, if things are headed the way it did the past few years, China might soon enough end up in a position similar to that of the USA.

Russia (noteworthy, it's no longer the USSR, if you combine all former USSR states into a single conglomerate, you get completely different results, but some of them are already as good as part of the EU, so it's a bit weirder) has 2.8% of the world's GDP and 2.1% of the world's population, which actually puts it (at least for the time being) in a far better position than China is in. Let's also not forget that they still have plenty of unexplored natural resources, as even without the former states they are still the LARGEST (by surface area) country in the entire world, with Canada being the second one right before China and the USA which are more or less tied for 3rd place... but both USA and Canada combined are barely a bit larger than Russia (again, the "smaller" Russia of today). Most of the EU is still heavily dependent on Russian natural gas, and the current Russian leadership isn't making it easy, especially as long as former USSR countries are being treated as good as being part of the EU.


So... yeah... the map, it's overly simplistic, overly theoretical and already out of date.
But yeah, on one thing I can agree... there can't be world peace, but that has nothing to do with GDPs and such things... it has to do with different governments. As long as countries exist, there will always be conflict. The only chance of "world peace" would be if the entire globe would be a single country, but there's no chance of that happening any time soon.

I have to say, I saw this on digg as well as you probably did. Honestly, it seemed rather meaningless and a little contrived.

And no Ranger, this is not the divide between Socialist states and non-socialist states. You're extremely one-note nowadays.

As for 'Real' profits Sickone, electronic wealth is real wealth. It is only fake when it is based on a bad deal, that won't happen. But for the most part that wealth is as real as the numbers are. (That doesn't say anything about the standard of living however.)

And to clarify my point to Ranger. Northern Europe as well as the UK as well as Canada are more socialist than we are. You yourself complain about both the UK and Canada. Saying India is starting to be successful and that China is not is also ridiculous.

As for their definition of heavily guarded.. plenty of people still cross into the US from Mexico, not that there's anything wrong with that. And if the borders don't mean anything, then that makes the rest of the map meaningless - I could have just circled all the countries with high gdp per capita.

It shows that money and technology are the root of all evil, gun. We young people are not that bad. :)

Money and technology are not the route of all evil. People are the root of all evil.

Unless you consider evil a constant then people cannot be the cause.

People are a constant, and constants do not explain variation.

You prove my point by blaming technology.