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New World Census Rankings

by Kindly Professor Hell
Mon, 20 Jan 2014

This post comes courtesy of resident Issues Tech Kindly Professor Hell.




NationStates offers a large number of rankings, allowing nations an opportunity to boast about their impressive achievements: Most Civil Rights, Happiest Citizens, Most Apathetic Citizens, Highest Crime Rate, and so on. Today, we announce two new ways of establishing your nation's superiority.

Most Scientifically Advanced measures a nation's scientific and technological progress. We can't tell you exactly how we measure it, but, yes, rocket science is involved. Or perhaps your nation feels that man should live in harmony with the Earth, and not meddle with things beyond our ken. A trophy for Most Primitive will remind you of the good old days when illness was treated with healing herbs and crystals and when thunder was known to be the gods calling out for more virgins—before the uncouth geeks from the north took over with their alphabets, their metallurgy and their chariots, and eventually desecrated the sacred groves with huge smartphone stores.

It can sometimes happen that a nation ranks highly in both Most Advanced and Most Primitive. This situation usually means that the nation has advanced wearable computers, but uses them only to cast horoscopes.

Another ranking was introduced a while ago, but perhaps is worth mentioning now. This is the Most Developed ranking, which computes a national Human Development Index, similar to the way a certain Unspeakably Named world organization computes it. The HDI is a blend of economic well-being, literacy and lifespan. See this thread for some discussion of how it works.

We think the HDI is interesting, because maxing out your HDI is an interestingly different goal your nation can try after achieving perfect freedom, perfect equality and/or perfect misery. It should not surprise you that a high development score will likely give a boost to your scientific advancement as well.