The Global Peace Index (GPI) will run into some flak. A country that applied the simple Roman maxim—“if you want peace, prepare for war”—would score badly. By unconditionally endorsing low military budgets and marking down high ones, the index may seem to give heart to freeloaders: countries that enjoy peace precisely because others (often America) care for their defence. Indeed, one of the ideas behind NATO and several other security pacts is that America’s protection limits the need for medium-sized powers to be big military players in their own right.
Still, perhaps the main thing about the index is not where countries are now, but how they change over time: if a country is getting more peaceful, presumably that is good—and if it is becoming less so, that could be a warning. Which way a nation is going may matter more than its ranking. But remember, some Buddhists say change is an illusion, no less than fixity: “By stating that there is neither motion nor rest, we follow the path of the middle.”
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ReplyDeleteYou can measure it, but can you understand it?
The Economist
http://www.economist.com/node/9266967?story_id=9266967
Whether as an entrepreneur or as a philanthropist, Steve Killelea thinks the simplest maxims work best. And in business, a few basic ideas have served him well: from a headquarters in Sydney he has created a firm, Integrated Research, that supplies systems management for credit cards, stock exchanges and cash dispensers across the world. And as one of Australia’s biggest (and most discreet) donors of aid to poor countries, he also likes to keep things simple: his mission is to help the “poorest of the poor” in practical ways.
But uncomplicated maxims are not necessarily uncontroversial. Having overlaid the Irish Catholicism of his childhood with a dose of Tibetan Buddhism, he warms to the pacifist strain in the Asian creed. One of his favourite Buddhist sayings is that “your enemy is your best teacher”. More contentiously, the bottom-line-minded businessman and the pacifist in Mr Killelea come together in a conviction that peacefulness, like anything important, can and must be calibrated. “What you can’t measure, you can’t understand,” he says.
That, roughly, is the chain of thought which prompted him to order up a new way of assessing countries’ general condition: along with GDP, trade balance and so on, it will now be possible to check out a country’s ranking by “peacefulness”. The methodology for the “global peace index” was devised by the Economist Intelligence Unit, our sister company.
The index takes note of internal factors—crime rates, prison population, trust between citizens—and external ones, like relations with neighbours, arms sales, foreign troop deployments. Norway’s top place reflects its calm domestic atmosphere and good relations with nearby states. In the case of Israel (119th), high military spending, a huge army and unresolved local conflicts are deemed to outweigh its low level of ordinary crime. Canada comes eighth; its American neighbour a dismal 96th, strangely just above Iran.
The index will run into some flak. A country that applied the simple Roman maxim—“if you want peace, prepare for war”—would score badly. By unconditionally endorsing low military budgets and marking down high ones, the index may seem to give heart to freeloaders: countries that enjoy peace precisely because others (often America) care for their defence. Indeed, one of the ideas behind NATO and several other security pacts is that America’s protection limits the need for medium-sized powers to be big military players in their own right.
Still, perhaps the main thing about the index is not where countries are now, but how they change over time: if a country is getting more peaceful, presumably that is good—and if it is becoming less so, that could be a warning. Which way a nation is going may matter more than its ranking. But remember, some Buddhists say change is an illusion, no less than fixity: “By stating that there is neither motion nor rest, we follow the path of the middle.”