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How Old Is the Average Country?
Daniel_Stuckey writes with a snippet from his piece at Vice: "I did some calculations in Excel, using independence dates provided on About.com, and found the average age of a country is about 158.78 years old. Now, before anyone throws a tizzy about what makes a country a country, about nations, tribes, civilizations, ethnic categories, or about my makeshift methodology, keep in mind, I simply assessed 195 countries based on their political sovereignty. That is the occasion we're celebrating today, right?"
I'm happy here in the UK, enjoying the thousands of years of history. U jelly murica?
Excel and About.com
The G
Next can we get a graph that correlates height to hat wearing or some other useful statistic.
I'm pretty sure there was a little spat in china around 1949....
and an Emperor rules an Empire then who rules a country?
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
158.78 years old.
Next.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
What about standard deviation and median? At least give me a histogram.
Given that this is America's 237'th birthday, which make us 78.22 years older than the average (49.26%), should they change the name of the magazine from "The New Republic" to "The Somewhat-Older-Than-Average Republic"?
A cursory look at the Wikipedia article indicates that Egypt has spent time under the rule of a few empires here and there over history, but it and Greece have both been their own societies for several thousand years in spite of this. I figure that both countries are closer to the age of China than they're listed...but that's just me.
Poland 95 years old? Germany 142 years? Italy 152? Greece 184? Come on, you can do better than that. Nice try. Next try.
It was already revealed a couple weeks back that we ARE Big Brother. So what's your point?
Author assumed, that a country didn't exist before getting independence. That is not always true because a country may lost independence temporarily and regain it later. For example Poland exists since 966 (1047 years) but wasn't independent from 1975 to 1918 and during some other periods, like WW2 and communism. Author took year 1918 and concluded Poland is 95 years old which is not true.
This is (almost definitely) a completely incorrect method to calculate "the average age of a country". The statistic provided here is the average age of (a sample of) countries existing at present, not the average age of countries that have existed. The difference might seem pedantic, but it has an immense effect on the computed statistic, because it excludes countries which existed briefly, no matter how recently. Some geographical locations have been through many, many sovereignties during the 158.78 years quoted. (This could be called left-censored data, because everything is excluded if it is not current at the moment of observation).
A better statistic might be the mean duration of countries that have existed over the last few centuries, which will slightly underestimate due to countries that will continue to exist (which could be called right-censored data).
A further improvement would be to take the median, because country life-spans are likely to have a strongly skewed distribution, perhaps approximating Pareto distribution, with a long, thin tail of a small number of very long lifespans.
I'm pretty sure* the distribution is not Gaussian, so the mean is a misleading statistic. At least add the median as well.
Also, as others have pointed out, there seems to be some rather problematic methodological issues with the way age is defined and used in the data set.
* This is Slashdot; you didn't think I would go and actually check, do you?
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Slashdot is dead.
Long live Slashdot!
While the author of this -interesting in any case- article writes "Now, before anyone throws a tizzy about what makes a country a country, about nations, tribes, civilizations, ethnic categories, or about my makeshift methodology, keep in mind, I simply assessed 195 countries based on their political sovereignty.", it's still not an excuse for this very limited definition of a "country"...
Usually a "country", especially if it's not "multi-cultural/race" like U.S.A. (by the way... happy birthday!), it's more than a "political sovereignty" - for example, Greeks were under Ottoman rule by force from 1453 A.D. (fall of Constantinople) until 1821 when the last -there were many others before- revolution for freedom began, and some Greeks even consider that it's still "work in progress"! Even under Ottoman rule, most Greeks were in a state of limited autonomy (Turks and their Muslim allies were just collected taxes), and some places were fully autonomus (Ottomans were not able to defeat locals). And for a couple of years in the World War 2 we were under the German-Italian rule.
So, Greece (184 years old as the article states) is at least as old as Japan (2673 years old as the article states) and surely older than USA (237 years old as the article states)...
Using political dates for some countries, yet cultural age for others? What's even the point. Most "countries", in terms of their government are, in fact, very young. China's and Japan's current governments both came about after WW2. It's a laughable political fiction to say China and Japan have been the same countries for 2000+ years.
One can go across the map and pick out the inconsistencies. Using the date of unification for the UK, yet listing France as 1100 years. Hell, why stop there, why not just go back and include the era of Frankish kingdoms too. Pad those stats some more.
This would be an interesting exercise if the methodology had been consistent and logical.
Interesting I though I would try this:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=average+age+of+all+the+countries.
What about former countries? Yugoslavia? How old is Serbia? It wasn't a country while it was part of Yugoslavia.
The list goes on and on.
Wasn't fully sovereign until 1982. So there is more than political sovereignty in this map.
if you're looking for average lifespan of a country, you have to actually look at countries that are no longer around. since ones that are alive you have no idea of how long they will continue to be alive. maybe one day, maybe a thousand years. if all the countries you sampled are still around then your sample size - as far as survival time is concerned - is effectively zero. you could assume an exponential probability distribution and try to compose a maximum likelihood estimate based on they all will live longer than they have been around, or on average their expectation is twice as long as they've been around, but still... why make such extrapolations when you can use actual samples from countries that are no longer around?
Siam has been there for a long time. Yes they get overrun a few times but they are still there.
We didn't gain that until some time later. We're celebrating the declaration of intention to gain sovereignty.
Comparison of arbitrary dates which are pretty meaningless on their own and totally meaningless compared to each other. Who picked this "newsworthy item" for main page of /.?
These numbers are all wrong. For example, France, which is listed as an old country, has had many revolutions, border changes, etc. The current constitution dates to 1958. The same can be said of China. Modern China has undergone many border changes, was comprised of several kingdoms, and it's current governmental system dates to 1949. Japan is in a similar situation, what with WWII, shoguns, etc. More interesting would be a chart showing how old the system of government is. In that case, you will probably find that the USA is one of the oldest around.
I do not see that people are primarily defined by what government they're under. Human relationships are less bounded, more amorphous, more interwoven than the neat lines and branches nationalism would imply.
Come on! The Assyrian people didn't go away because their empire ended; there's an identifiable group of them living today. The local past didn't disappear when nations like modern Germany and Italy united out of their former parts. People don't sever their family relationships and traditions at the border. That's just a tribal us/them line of thought convenient mostly for authoritarians and warmongers.
This is why we need to quit reading history books that define our past by nations and wars. Biology, culture and philosophy and technology are not so bounded.
Did you assess the US based on the beginning of the Civil War, or today's current date? Because legally, it was a different country - a different government rulers, different governmental rules, and with different laws - enforced upon the losers of the war by those who won.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
That is the occasion we're celebrating today, right? Nope, we're celebrating independence from the crown and Great Britain, and we repeat the process annually to celebrate our current state of affairs and that amounts to be our government being little more than corporate generated spam for which there is no filter and you cannot ignore or deny, and when it screws up, it's the peoples fault.
A couple of hundred years ago during the Franco British war ( 1688-1815 ) France conquered some British territory in North America, swamp land, mostly populated by swivel-eyed religious lunatics hell bent on slaughtering native Americans. Upshot: Britain gains control of Canada and most of the Caribbean and goes on to build the greatest empire the world has ever seen. France, bankrupted by the war collapses in famine and revolution. The lunatics? yes they got to slaughter the native Americans so they were happy. Happy birthday to ya, happy Birthday.
and it's fairly average
The date is a bit arbitrary, but I guess this cannot be resolved. One could prefer the french revolution of 1789, but indeed France existed as a kingdom for centuries before that. And it existed again as a kingdom after that, in 1815-1830.
If I remember by ancient Greek history correctly, Armenia was called Armenia in the time Alexander was building his empire. Does moving the borders here and there change the meaning of "country"?
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Russia can't be 22 years old. It is technically considered as a successor state to USSR, which was a successor state to the Imperial Russia
He lost me at "That is the occasion we're celebrating today, right?", wrong. Today is Higgs Day - one year since the announcement of the Higgs!
well i thought the Greeks the language and their cities existed thousand years before Christ....
Just because a country changes its name or political regime it doesn't become a different country.
843 is the Treaty of Verdun, which is the split of the carolingian empire into 3 pieces.
987, the election of Hugh Capet as King of France, is usually taken as the begining of France as we know it.
When the Romans ran the show there, it was called Brittany.
Started as "Insulae Britannicae" referring to the islands, then the part which became a Roman province was known as Britannia, and later divided into Britannia Superior and Britannia Inferior.
And don't even start the geeks on Guy Fawkes, him of the anonymous mask that they all wear made in Chinese state run factories, a Catholic royalist who was up for replacing one king who claimed his divine right with another just of a different religious flavour. Nothing in there about helping the poor/women's votes/ anarchism/open source data formats.
Give us a call after your first 500 years or so, I am sure you'll have some fun stories to tell the grandkids by then as well!
The stupidest thing I've seen this week.
Age of a country != Time since last occupation.
Ha ha, well said both.
When I was a junior postdoc I was renting a house built in 1729 with bits from the previous build still showing, early 1500s sections of wall and doorways. And our friends thought we were insane coming in to college 8 miles each day. Me and my mates thought it beat living in the modern Victorian rubbish (houses built in 1880s) which were closer.
Older than America.
Austria given as 1k+ years, which was probably the first time it became independent (or was it being mentioned in writing?). However I distinctly remember that not-so-long ago we were assimilated by Germany for some years, like the rest of Europe (arguably, we were stupid enough to say "yay" instead of putting up a fight).
So any country in middle Europe where the age is given as more than 70 years is provably wrong.
As all you did was take into account the 'name' of a region of land as being a 'country' and not
anything about political rule, the results are worthless and misleading.
The cornucopia of confusion evidenced above could easily be resolved by using the US definition of a country: that date when the First Settlers, having arrived at an unoccupied land (or having exterminated enough of the indigenous people to make it essentially unoccupied), spit in the face of the country that supported their colonization efforts and mount a PR campaign in the form of a document proclaiming themselves to be upholders of the most basic human rights.
What a nonsensical chauvinistic collection of tosh. I come across this sentiment a lot, the urge for being old, older or the oldest in some sense, only to erroneously derive some emotional authority from that fact. This rational is always used for dubious nationalistic underbelly feelings, it is sickening.
Not only is the concept of "a age of a country" problematic, in this case gauged apparently on the creation, alteration or replacing of a governing institute, it is in fact arbitrary and suspiciously selective in it's criteria.
Bending these selection rules to suit your nationalistic needs is trivially easy. Many countries could claim to be direct descendants from the roman empire through law, borders, tradition or otherwise resulting in countries thousands of years old. Where would you object to this? The end of the reign of roman kings and the start of the roman republic? Perhaps at the end of the republic and the beginning of the roman empire? Could the relocation of the capitol to constantinople be a pivot point or would the creation of the western and eastern roman empire be a good starting point?
Being of little substance, the "age" argument could also be used as a negative attribute. The stone age, being a symbol for things old and primitive, arguably ended around 1492 in the americas whereas most of europe stopped that clock two millennia BCE. Primitive oaks!
Why not claim that Germany is less than 25 years old? The reunification clearly was a landmark event that reshaped the country, it's law and it's government. But then, there is the end of WWII, the Weimar republic before that and the empire preceding it. The latest unification event was the end result of a century old struggle to unite the germanic people, would it not be fitting to mark that initial attempt as the true birth of an identity, and therefor a country?
Of course this completely ignores the Hapsburg empire as well as the Ottonian rule in this area in the mid and early middle ages. The tribal history of the inhabitants of this area is also completely ignored, despite giving the roman empire a good run for their money in 9 CE.
You see how utterly silly, contrived and non sensical this type of pseudo-historical reasoning is? Abusing logic and historical narrative to create nationalist fuzzy warm feeling in the underbelly is a sentiment that, whatever you consider the age of your arbitrary set of border and ever changing governing laws, will severely shorten this perceived notion of age.
Then the inclusion of Hawaii marks the age of the USA.
Before then, it wasn't the current United States of America.
When you had that war of independence, you later had the secession of the southern states, so changed then.
You had the inclusion of territories in "the United States", but then they applied for statehood, changing the political existence of the country by that change.
However, apparently these do not count in the USA's age, but DO count in the age of, for example, Austria, Poland, Hungary, France, ...
Making your country, what, 40 years old?
Either that or the UK (nee England, nee Greater Brittain) dates back to the loss of the Roman control, having restructured the country into much more homogenous cooperating kingdoms and leading to a United Kingdom some time in the Dark Ages, maybe 700AD.
Political sovereignty is a crappy metric. Does anyone really think Egypt is only 150-70 years old? Conquering a country and then releasing it again does mean you "recreated" it. People still would have called themselves Egyptian, I'm pretty sure they didn't have as much rights of movement as a white British subject, had a different government hierachy (sure the queen is the queen but colonies generally get governors or military commanders with defacto soverign rights) etc. Similarly with Ethopia, geez both of these are mentioned in the bible and as far as I know were pretty well defined chunks of real estate back then.
I think culture, geography and to a lesser extent language are better metrics.Korea is still Korea whether it is currently (and probably temporarily over the long term hundreds of years you judge kingdoms/eras by) divided in 2 or not. Racist Koreans likely will still consider someone on the 5km on the other side of the NK SK border as "acceptable" were as 5km across any other border would be an abomination.
Lastly was July 4th really Americas sovereignty? I would argue that. The colonies declared independence but they still had to fight for it. Anyone in NK is free to declare the Koreas unified but until the other side agrees (or at least stops shooting you when you cross the bordrer) it doesn't matter.
Gained territory by annexing Japan? New country. Added Hawaii? New Country. Lost the southern states in a war of secession? New country.
Change territorial waters to 200 miles? New country.
Canada finally got full control over their constitution in 1982. Before that they needed approval from the British Parliment for changes. So it's only 31 years old.
Libre is what we're celebrating, no?
Political: "We are a country, see, because we have a name and some documents, and we are united by our belief in capitalism (donuts) and equality (welfare). Anyone is welcome here who agrees with those."
Organic: "My people evolved in this land and have possessed it for centuries, improving it and themselves. We are inseparable from it. The only people welcome here are ourselves, and everyone else must find their own nation."
Futurist Traditionalism
Here in the US a house built in the early 1900s is ancient, and over two hundred years old is a museum piece. Meanwhile, my German father in law is living in a house something like 600+ years old.
Of course, the real danger to having old structures in Europe is the various wars over the years. If they weren't burned to the ground in the 1300-1700s, they were bombed to bits in WWII.
Indeed. When you buy a house in the UK that's pre-1940s and in an urban area you check to see if there's historical bomb damage: often places got patched up quickly with available materials and 70 years later the substandard fixes can be decaying, cracks opening etc.
I often wonder if this is one of the reasons people in the USA seem so much more enthusiastic about going to war than Europeans - we can still see the evidence around us in the architecture and people are still alive who have frightening memories of how it affected them at home. Next time you're in London check the front of the Victoria and Albert museum, you can still see the shrapnel damage to the stone work.
19th century housing here is just standard for lots of people.It's waht you rent when you're a student. I prefer it to modern places: the latter are mainly wood built and thrown up quickly. I know the place I bought (late C19th, typical urban red bricker starter home) has been through two wars and hasn't moved in 130 years so it's likely to outlive me :-)
Greece was never a 'country', rather a state, before 1831.
The ' Kingdom of the Anglecynn' dates back to king Alfred the Great (died 899 AD).
France may be considered as a country since 987 AD but was known as 'Kingdom of the Franks', the name 'Kingdom of France' dates back to 1204.
The modern German state dates back to 1871.
See the these very informative maps: http://www.euratlas.net/history/europe/index.html
About.com has the independence day of Estonia as February 24, 1918. However, Estonia lost its independence in the beginning of WWII and got it back only when Soviet Union ceased to exist. So, how old is Estonia?
There are some things that should never be added to the list of goods and services that corporations have an incentive to become competitive and to profit as much as possible with because doing to will contribute to the downfall of a society. The reason for that is that doing so introduces the motivation to do those or sell those things even when they are unnecessary and to reduce costs by lowering the quantity and quality of the goods or services being sold.
Coming to your house to put out a fire is an example. Investigating rapes and murders is another. One can imagine the effect on US society were those things to be turned into for-profit ventures. Others, off the top of my head, that have been turned into for-profit ventures with unfortunate and predictable results include waging war on other countries to obtain their energy resources, running prison systems, providing health care insurance, and providing global surveillance services.
Is it just me or is there a certain arbitrariness to all of this?
Can't we all just call ourselves the Earthling Humanoids, get along, and start working to save the polar bears and ourselves?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Methodology is bogus. Ethiopia, as an example, was only occupied for a short period of time during the 20th century. It was a long standing kingdom before that. It is registered as young state, due to the date of its latest independence. China on the other hand is marked as 3k years old. Fair enough. But it was similarly chopped in pieces, colonized and occupied during a good share of the 20th century. India is as old a country, and Iran could be 600 years old (or even 4k years old, depending on how you count). Taking independence dates and making a graph is plain stupid. It takes knowledge of history, and relevant events on each cultures and people to make such a graph.
No countries have ever actually existed. They were all (and still are) figments of some over zealous bureaucrats imagination. National boundaries are usually completely arbitrary lines drawn on map, with little thought given to the people that are actually on the ground. Nationality is nothing more than a coincidence of birth. Neither I nor anybody else chose to a citizen of the locale in which we were born. At best, nationality is just another excuse for vested interests to restrict our travel movements and to curtail our freedoms. In many cases it is also a very profitable source of revenue. It is especially interesting that corporations can become multinational relatively easily, but individuals are subject to more and more restrictions in terms of security and visas every year. At worst, the curse of nationality is the cause of more conflict than any other, including religion. And yet nationality cannot even be strictly defined. A Chinese for example, does not have to be born in China to be Chinese. And it is highly unlikely that a Caucasian born in China could ever be considered Chinese. Nationality is simply a myth, sometimes it is more to do with appearance and culture than anything else. The sooner we dump these backward concepts the better for all of us. I would highly recommend Leopold Kohr's "Breakdown of Nations" as some interesting background reading on this subject. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Kohr
A nation cannot efficiently govern no more than 2 million citizens.
I believe every nation should be decentralized into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantons_of_switzerland
Casteism
Further, why pick 1776 as the birth of the US? Since 37 of the 50 states were founded and joined the union after this date, one could pick the day the last state joined (Hawaii - August 21, 1959) as the date when the United States was fully formed. Or conversely, one could look to the date that the earliest colony which eventually became a state was founded - May 24, 1607 under the current calendar is when James Fort, was founded by the Virginia Company of London. I'ts 1609 royal charter extended from "sea to sea," and on the south its border was roughly at the present day border on North & South Carolina, and the northern border was a 45 degree angle that started about where Atlantic City New Jersey is today, heading north-west through the middle of the great lakes, north of Michigan. (despite the fact that no one from Virginia got more than a few miles west of the Atlantic Ocean) and hence this colony did "own" a fair bit of the area of what is now the US of A.