Group Mason Kirkpatrick & Rose Mayer Background This lab continues to build off the themes of exploring the possibility of the capitalocene that we have looked at in the first two labs. This being said, the World Values Survey (WVS) does provide new ways to look into the capitalocene. The main way being that it surveyed a large number of citizens about their opinions relating to their environmental ideologies. This allows us to look at the capitalocene from a bottom up perspective rather than the top down perspective we have taken in the past. Procedure The first thing we did was we selected three different countries that varied by income group. We chose Ukraine for our low income, Azerbaijan for our middle income, and the United States for our high income. We then moved the responses of these countries from the main WVS sheet onto a new one so that we could have them more readily available. From there we were able to create a histogram of the variable that we chose, being whether individuals prioritize the environment or economic growth. Next we calculated the mean and mean standard deviation for each countries responses, making sure that we excluded responses that were outside of the binary. From there we graphed each to compare how each country we looked at felt about this issue. Finally we performed T-Tests to assess the statistical significance of the difference between the means of each country and since the p was so small we were able to determine our results were statistically significant. Results Before we began we hypothesized that as we moved up the income groups countries would began to prioritize the environment over economic growth. After looking at our completed graphs we were able to see that this was not totally the case. While they do not disprove our hypothesis, the fact that Azerbaijan, a middle income country, favors economic growth more than Ukraine, a low income country, contradicts our hypothesis. That being said, the United States, a high income country, favors environmental protection more than the other two so that supports our initial hypothesis. When confronted by these results we were curious as to why a country like Azerbaijan would be so interested in economic growth when it was already in fair economic standing. After a little research we noticed that Azerbaijan was a very small oil rich nation, so their prioritization of economic growth may be tied to their ability to use their natural resources for large scale financial gain. Discussion
The WVS data that we observed allowed us to view evidence of the capitalocene on a personal basis rather than on a governmental scale. Looking at these issues on a personal scale lets us see how the populations of different countries feel about certain issues. The data we have looked at in the past capitalocene labs were much more all encompassing and generalized based on governmental factors rather than the personal opinions of the populations these governments look after. When comparing countries as a method of assessing the capitalocene it seems that only using either World Bank Data or WVS data to assess it would fail to provide the necessary amount of context or information. The best way to do this would be to look at both sources of information and data to most accurately come to a conclusion relating to the existence of the capitalocene.
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AuthorMason Kirkpatrick. Class of 2021 Archives
November 2018
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