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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?"
Excel and About.com
The G
The author gives the UK age as 306 in his map. (He did use about.com as a "source")
158.78 years old.
Next.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
The UK is a new fangled invention at 306 years old but England is 1086 years old, happy birthday America.
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.
"England" may be 1000+ years old but 1) it's far from certain that it's the same "England" as today, and 2) it was a subsidiary of Normandy, Inc. for quite some time, pardon my Middle French.
Ezekiel 23:20
A count, I presume? (Although nowadays, from what people are telling me, it more like someone called a "countant" rules the land, or how this horrible notion is spelled.)
Ezekiel 23:20
I'm happy here in the UK, enjoying the thousands of years of history.
Speaking of history, you obviously didn't pay attention in class. The UK is only 306 years old (Acts of Union in 1706 and 1707). And you folks complain about Americans not understanding the difference between England/Scotland/Wales, Britain and the UK.
P.S. If you see the queen, say happy Independence Day for me.
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.
Yeah. If a country merged with some other country, or was temporaly invaded by another, then for these guys its as if this country did not exist beforehand. I mean just look at the Iberian Peninsula or France. The borders have been mostly stable for yonks and look at the claimed age. Just pathetic.
So dear US readers... Please explain to me why the UK is as old as the Act of Union while you did not measure the age of your country starting with the annexation of Texas or some other quaint date like that.
Interesting I though I would try this:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=average+age+of+all+the+countries.
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?
He's using political dates for all countries.
If you ask a Pole when his country became independent he will tell that it was when the last King of Congress Poland (aka: the Czar) fell in 1918. If you ask a Swede when his country became independent he'll give you 1523, when the Danes were thrown out. The Chinese, Japanese, and French all claim direct lineage to states founded a long time before that.
You can argue that the French and Chinese are full of shit, or that the "age of a country" like Poland can't accurately be calculated by it's independence day. You cannot argue that the author used a double-standard.
You may call it Independence Day, but over here it's just the anniversary of when we finally got shot of those troublesome colonies started by religious fanatics.
Rationalize all you want - we beat you. As for those religious fanatics, you should have known better than to go up against them They were the same variety that beheaded your king in 1649.
Please explain to me why the UK is as old as the Act of Union while you did not measure the age of your country starting with the annexation of Texas or some other quaint date like that.
Mentioning Texas is hitting below the belt.
On the other hand, this site lists Austria as 1037 years old, Hungary as 1012. Please remind me, what country did that guy named Franz Joseph rule?
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Yep. England is older than the UK. But it's the UK that's on the map. The Acts of Union created a new entity. This is not an Edward Longshanks style of conquest. And it happened just a couple of decades after England had been conquered by the Netherlands.
Frankly that guy armed with Wikipedia and Excel either had a lot of balls or was blissfully unaware into what kind of mess he just stepped. Just wait until the French wake up in the morning.
20 minutes into the future
A thousand years ago England was French so ooh la la rosbif.
Actually it was Norman, which isn't quite the same thing. The Normans spoke French but were Norsemen who'd settled in Normandy only a century or two before the Norman Conquest. Even the name "Norman" derives from "Norse".
European here living in the States.
And I truly find the saying "the English think 100
miles is a long distance and the Americans think 100 years is a long time" to be really accurate!
And we returned the favour by owning more of France than the French for over 300 years. Not content with that we then had the largest empire the world had ever seen. Not bad for a little island of drizzle.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
On the US side it really under-states things.
Americans will accept a daily commute of 100 miles (50 miles a way), and won't understand why you didn't drive 150 miles out of your way to see them on the holidays. After all it's only two-and-a-half hours.
OTOH things that happened even 50 years ago (like the Civil Rights Movement) are ancient history.
That would be the Austro-Hungarian EMPIRE.
In case you hadn't heard, an EMPIRE is a group of countries with a common ruler.
In the case of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Austria and Hungary were countries that were PART of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Along with pieces of Germany and Italy and bits of various Balkan places...
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
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.
The definition of a when a country was created is also hard to pin down.
Looking at what should be a simple answer is the United States. The easy answer is to count from July 4th 1776 when the political entity 'The United States of America' declared itself independent. But there are any number of problems with this approach:
1. The majority of the land that currently comprises USA was not part of it in 1776.
2. The revolutionaries originally considered themselves 13 independent entities, loosely related by a group of common interests.
3. The original government (The Articles of Confederation) was superseded by The Constitution.
4. You could make some noise about the US Civil War, but the North never acknowledged the South's independence, and the rest of the objections would probably be covered by #1
5. OTOH, if you find #3 compelling, you could possibly argue that amendments to the constitution are a new governing document. The problem there is that it's hard to argue that, say, the passage of the 27th amendment represents a fundamental change in the governance of the US, but you could definitely make a case for the Reconstruction Era amendments (13-15) being a fundamental change. So if you accept this, then you need to have some kind of test to determine whether or not an amendment represent enough change to be considered a new government.
And those are just some of the issues at hand for ONE country on the list. Multiply that by 200, and you've got a real mess.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
It's not a troll, but it is clearly a July 4th inspired post. You know how I figured that out? By reading the following sentence;
"Today is the United States' 237th birthday" No need to look at the post date.
This clearly is not a scholarly review of history, but a set of factoids directed at those who deride the U.S. as colonial rubes because their nation has only been around for a couple of hundred years. I've previously been surprised that Germany didn't even exist until the 1800's. Italy wasn't Italy until relatively recently as well.
In terms of a national identity, combined with a continuously stable political environment, the US is indeed challenging arguably older societies on those metrics.
I'm curious as to why you chose to respond this post in the way you did. I mean, if it was just to be pedantic, it's a big fail.
There was almost a year of war before July 4th and several years after.
July 4th, is not V-Day. It's F-U-George III Day.
Depends what definition of the word "country" you use. Indeed, it can mean both "sovereign state" and merely a "political entity". Other than for the United Kingdom, though, the latter usually bears other names, like "state" or "land".
So, we have three levels here:
* a fully independent, sovereign state (USA, Germany, United Kingdom, in the past the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth)
* a division with its own laws and parliament: California, Texas, Bavaria, Scotland
* a voivodship/province/etc
You can place the cut-off either at level one or level two. My complaint here is that this page uses inconsistent criteria.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
You consider it the same country even after the Normans trounced you, completely changed the government and aristocracy, and even started to change the language almost beyond recognition. Yeah, right.
Technically, yes, historians do consider it to be the same country. William, Duke of Normandy was persuing a claim to the English throne as a relative of Edward the Confessor.
Yep. England is older than the UK. But it's the UK that's on the map. The Acts of Union created a new entity. This is not an Edward Longshanks style of conquest. And it happened just a couple of decades after England had been conquered by the Netherlands.
England was not `conquered' by the Netherlands, an essentially bloodless coup was orchestrated by the Stadtholder William of Orange and protestants in the English Parliament to oust James II and replace him with William and his wife Mary (James II;'s daughter and therefore heir) as co-ruler. Both countries remained independent, with only personal union of the monarch (William) linking them.
Humor is a medical term. You might be thinking of humour.
Aren't they forgetting the Anschluss in 1938? Do we the independence date for France to 1944, when the Germans were kicked out and they got control of their coutnry back? When do you set a date for Italy? Unification in 1870, or with the establishment of the Roman Empire 2000 years earlier? How old is China? Was it established in 1949, 1919, 216BC or 2100 BC? How old is Egypt? 3 days, two years or 5000 years?
What is left of The Roman Empire is now called Liechtenstein. This is not a simple history, in fact it is complex and based on many old treaties that have full legal status even today, some are more then 500 years old. For instant, the country of Prussia existed from the year 1525 to the year 1947. I live in the part of Denmark that was once a part of Prussia, it did go under control of Denmark in the year 1920.
Prussia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussia
Liechtenstein: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liechtenstein
This map is simple at best and only minor part of this history when it comes to countries existence over time.
If latest unification is a criterion, the modern United States of America is only 54 years old, and should we really be counting Great Britain, since it's an EU country and the EU added a new country this week.
Honestly, France beat the British. Not America.
You know how the Korean War, although ostensibly a war between North and South Korea, was basically a war between the US and China? Yeah. The American Revolution was that, with Britain and France. Of course, our "AMERICA! FUCK YEAH!" school system and remnants of Manifest Destiny keep most people from thinking of it in those terms, but yeah, that's how it was. A small American rebellion persisted long enough to sap the British strength until some heavy aid from France was enough to shove them out of a war they no longer really cared for.
an essentially bloodless coup was orchestrated by the Stadtholder William of Orange
Bloodless? There's a bunch of corpses buried in Reading that might well dispute that claim. Aye, and not to mention, me laddie, there's a whole lot o' Scots and Irish who will happily kick you in the nadgers for suggesting it was bloodless.
In any case, the fact that the people of England supported the invader doesn't mean it wasn't a foreign invasion, unless you're hopelessly devoted to the myth that England hasn't been invaded since William.
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!
your sig is pretty appropriate.
if we're going by the standard used in the articles sources.. it's silly that usa isn't counted from the end of the civil war. heck, many countries have ruler lineages going further than the supposed age of the country..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I'm happy here in the UK, enjoying the thousands of years of history.
Speaking of history, you obviously didn't pay attention in class. The UK is only 306 years old (Acts of Union in 1706 and 1707). And you folks complain about Americans not understanding the difference between England/Scotland/Wales, Britain and the UK.
You also didn't pay attention in that class. The UK is not a country rather it's an amalgamation of individual countries. The name is not the "United Kingdom" it's the "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland". It consists of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland whom each have their own parliaments. It's like saying the US is only as old as NATO because it's a member of NATO.
I would have pointed this out nicely, but you acted like such an pompous arse (yes, propper spelling, there is an R in there, an ass is a donkey) I couldn't help myself.
P.S. The Queen, her majesty Elizabeth the second, being a polite, proper and fair person would wish you and you nation well on this day of celebration, despite your ignorance and disrespectful attitude.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
(Personally, I prefer the "sovereign entity" definition, so would include both UK and Austro-Hungarian Empire as countries, but a project like this really ought to apply some degree of consistency, so should have either both or neither.)
Yes, exactly.
Rationalize all you want - we beat you. As for those religious fanatics, you should have known better than to go up against them]
So a bad idea to go against religious fanatics?
Those that don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it
OT: My other half is a music/arty promoter type person and last year she was at Edinburgh Fringe chatting with someone who does a similar job in the US. She was telling this person about a recent gigs she'd put on in an Arts centre, a converted medieval church. ~Said person remarked words to the effect "Holy crap, your venue is older than my country!"
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.