Friday, April 19, 2024

Racist country rankings

I tried to look up country rankings for racism around the world and I found two studies with very different results. 

US News and World Report publishes an annual Best Countries report. One category is "racial equity". The US ranked 73rd out of 87 countries in 2020, just below Lebanon. Not very good.

The other was World Values Survey, which asked people, for example, whether they would be comfortable living next to someone of a different race. The US did well in this one, with less than 5% saying they would be uncomfortable. 

So which one is right? The primary difference in methodology is that US News asked people around the world what their perception was, while World Values Survey asked people what they themselves thought. My guess is the discrepancy is caused by strong media bias in the US reaching a global audience.

I graphed the countries below. Only Uruguay had a bigger discrepancy between perception and reality.