Ingelhart's Key Findings Part 1

August 16, 2024
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Art

Finding 1: Level of Tolerance is Closely Linked to A society's Income Level

The data here come from 99 countries and span the years 1981 to 2009. He used the 2000 World Bank classifications of countries as low-income, lower-middle-income, and so on.

Let's turn our attention to this graph showing the relationship between income level and tolerance. Ingelhart built this table using countries' income categories in 2000 and countries scores on each of the six Rigid statements.

There are several conclusions we can draw from this graph:

  • people in high-income countries supported homosexuality, women's rights and gender equality more than any other group. People in low-income countries support these the least.
  • high-income societies were overwhelmingly tolerant, scoring between 70-90% on each of the six areas measured.
  • there is a clear relationship between a society's income level and its level of tolerance.
  • it seems that support for one Freedom norm correlated with support for the others: e.g. high demand for equal education opportunities exists in societies with high tolerance for homosexuality (this is backed up by statistical calculations).

To be more precise, Ingelhart claimed that tolerance in these six areas in high-income societies sat at around 80%, compared to 38% in low-income societies.  

And more broadly, life security (income level + life expectancy + infant mortality levels) and scores on the Postmaterialist index together explain 73% of the variation in nations' scores.

There is one conclusion that is patently obvious to me: our levels of tolerance are not random. Intolerance (high support for the six Rigid norms) is completely natural in conditions where we need to focus on simply surviving.

And today's most tolerant countries were severely intolerant just 100 years ago. As I promised, this data seriously undermines the idea that as Westerns we're living in an intolerant dystopia.

Key Finding 2: Levels of Tolerance have Radically Increased in Recent Decades

Along the same lines, this second graph below indicates the overall change in countries' support for Freedom norms over the course of survey years.

Support for Freedom norms increased in 40 of the 58 countries surveryed. And it increased in 24 of the 25 high-income countries. In fact, support for Freedom values increased in all cohorts in all 14 of the high-income societies that were involved in the entire longitudinal survey. We'll return to this point later.

This final graph goes a long way to validating Ingelhart's Individual-choice metric and the connection between income levels and tolerance.

Notice the countries that are least tolerant gays not only score very low on the Freedom values measure, but are all either in Africa, Asia, or the Middle East.