Monday Trivia, No. 151 [gingergene wins!]
I found reliable enough and recent enough statistics from 63 nations to prepare for this week’s list.
While a number will exist for every nation, I suspect not every nation collects this to prepare statistics, so for some nations the number will be impossible to ascertain. It’s theoretically possible that the number could be negative, but I found no instances of this in the nations I surveyed.
| Nation(s) | Statistic |
|---|---|
| Albania | 5.3 |
| Azerbaijan | 4.2 |
| Montenegro | 4.1 |
| Lebanon | 4.0 |
| Armenia | 3.9 |
| India, Tajikistan | 3.8 |
| Georgia | 3.7 |
| Bosnia and Herzegovina, Romania, Vietnam | 3.4 |
| Kyrgyzstan, Turkey | 3.3 |
| Serbia | 3.2 |
| Bulgaria, Slovakia | 3.1 |
| Germany, Italy, Macedonia, Mexico | 3.0 |
| Croatia, Greece | 2.9 |
| Austria, Moldova, Russia, Uzbekistan, Czech Republic, Ukraine | 2.8 |
| Netherlands, South Korea, Israel, Kazakhstan, Philippines | 2.7 |
| Sweden | 2.6 |
| Hungary, Slovenia | 2.5 |
| Estonia, Denmark | 2.4 |
| Finland, Hong Kong, Lithuania, Malaysia, Switzerland, Norway | 2.3 |
| Belgium, Spain, United Kingdom, Iceland | 2.2 |
| Belarus, Ireland, Latvia, Malta | 2.1 |
| France, Mongolia, Brazil, Canada, United States of America | 2.0 |
| Australia, Poland | 1.9 |
| Japan | 1.7 |
| Portugal, Singapore | 1.5 |
| Kuwait | 0.0 |
I’m conscious of the fact that this list contains no nations from Africa and only one from South America. I regret this, but I couldn’t readily find the numbers for such nations from reliable sources when writing the question. Chalk that up to laziness on my part. Still, I was quite surprised that numbers from PRC and RSA were not available.
Burt Likko is the pseudonym of an attorney in Southern California. His interests include Constitutional law with a special interest in law relating to the concept of separation of church and state, cooking, good wine, and bad science fiction movies. Follow his sporadic Tweets at @burtlikko, and his Flipboard at Burt Likko.
Since Kuwait is the only Arab country on the list and has a statistic of 0.0, and since you’ve said that it’s theoretically possible to have a negative number, I think it’s going to be something that has to do with interest rates of some sort, or is at least something tightly correlated with interest rates. What gives me pause is that the PIIGS are mostly not outliers amongst the EU countries listed.
Whatever it is, though, it’s got to be some sort of a rate statistic.Report
A birthrate or fertility rate?Report
Inflation rate.Report
I would think that you could get inflation rates for African countries.Report
Change in GDP.Report
Increase in height of the average adult male.Report
Tuesday hint: the number represents a difference between two other numbers.Report
Amount of X compared to Kuwait’s.Report
Wednesday hint: this trivia puzzle is a nice warm-up for our upcoming symposium.Report
Marriage rate relative to the U.S.?Report
Difference between average waist size of men and average waist size of women.Report
Difference in average age of men vs. women for first marriage?Report
I think you got it.Report
This is exactly correct. I still find it very odd that although most nations keep vital statistics in some form, so few have these numbers reported or at least available.
I also think that it stands out that the norm of husbands being older than wives seems to prevail in nations where the cultural expectation is for arranged marriages rather than self-selection of spouses; it prevails in Asian, Arab and Western cultures. I’d have predicted, especially in the more industrialized and liberal nations, that the average age of first-time marital partners would have come close to equalizing.
Is there something special about Kuwaiti culture that produces this result?Report
It looks like what’s going on with Kuwait is an error on Wikipedia (I’m assuming that’s where you grabbed that number from). If you look at their source for Kuwait, quandl.com, you see that it has Kuwaiti women marrying for the first time at 27.5, and the men at 28.9, which is still out of sync with the rest of their region but not quite the anomaly they first seemed.
You can also see their data on Africa, South America & PRC. I have no idea where the data on that site comes from, but hey, it was good enough for Wikipedia, right?Report
Correction: it looks like it comes from the World Bank, at least for the Kuwait data. It also looks like marriage in Kuwait got complicated between 1985, when the average age was 22.9/26.3 (F/M) and 1995, when it was 27.0/28.5. I wonder what could have happened to all the marriage-aged men?!?Report
I got the data from the NationMaster database, and confirmed samples from it against Wikipedia’s list.
There was a war involving Kuwait in that time, of course, but IIRC, there were not all that many casualties amongst the Kuwaiti civilian population. And Kuwait’s economy and population have exploded since then, with total people rising by more than half again its post-Gulf War I level. One suspects this suggests immigrant workers rather than a baby boom of such magnitude — and if age of marriage is increasing along with a population boom, then maybe what’s going on is the immigrant workers aren’t able to get marriage licenses for some reason (perhaps they’re only given to citizens?) and at the same time the increased wealth and increased educational levels have resulted in young people of both sexes, but especially women, to defer marriage until later in life.
Just theories.Report