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Old November 24th, 2015 #1
Zorost
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Default Economic Study on Honesty, Data on Differences Between 15 Countries

A lot of interesting data here, mainly pointing towards a need for trust if a country is to advance. The study also shows that different countries have very different levels of honesty, in about the way a WNist would predict.

The nations studied:
Brazil, China, Greece, Japan, Russia, Switzerland, Turkey, United States, Argentina, Denmark, Great Britain, India, Portugal, South Africa, South Korea, and Turkey.

Check out the graphs on pg 9. According to the coin-flip test, the 4 least honest countries are the 4 Asian nations; China, Japan, India, SK. The 4 most honest countries were European nations; Gr Britain, Portugal, Greece, Switzerland.

https://www.uea.ac.uk/documents/3154...2-b872ea0ac882

There are large differences in honesty across countries. Average honesty is positively correlated with per capita GDP: this is driven mostly by GDP differences arising before 1950, rather than by GDP growth since 1950, suggesting that the growth honesty relationship was more important in earlier periods than today. A country’s average honesty correlates with the proportion of its population that is Protestant.
[note that there is a hispanic country, which would skew the data; it's probably not the religion but the culture that causes the dishonesty.]

Honesty might be good for growth because it encourages economic interactions beyond a narrow circle. For example, consider the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Selfish rational players will defect. Altruists may prefer to cooperate. But even otherwise selfish players will cooperate if they make a mutual promise to do so, and prefer not to break their promises. When people are honest enough, bare promises act like contracts, allowing gains from cooperation in situations where formal contracts would be hard to write or enforce. If honesty varies across cultures, as Feng proposes, then this mechanism may explain why levels of wealth vary too.
 
Old December 1st, 2015 #2
Crowe
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Default

Considering the most dishonest people on the planet, jews (Israel) were excluded from the study, I'm not sure this means a whole lot.
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