Aielyn said:
I actually do suck at statistics, but my use of "statistical difference" wasn't intended to actually be a statement of statistical comparison. What I was saying was that, while the difference between 5 people and 300 people is a dramatic difference as far as how things are run is concerned, the difference between 5 million and 300 million is negligible - that is, the difficulty in running a country of 5 million and a country of 300 million are comparable. And I'm guessing you've fallen for the same problem as most Americans, thinking Australia is tiny. Australia isn't 5 million, it's much closer to 25 million. And while it's not representative of America, it is comparable because of similar culture (not same, but similar), similar levels of multiculturalism, similar nation size, and similar concerns with regard to indigenous people. Of all of the other countries in the world, Australia is probably the one with the greatest number of similarities with America (likely closely followed by Canada, who are even more similar to Australia). As for Dunbar's number, you've again proven my point, really. Dunbar's number is around 150. Compared to 150, 5 million and 300 million are very similar numbers. The best way to demonstrate this is using a logarithmic scale. Let's use base 10. log(150) = 2.18 There's a much bigger difference between 150 and the others than there is between 5 million and 300 million. And in fact, I'd argue that Dunbar's number is a good way to get a sense of how the heirarchy of democracy should work - each scale should be of the order of 150, with roughly three layers in a country of 5 million and roughly four layers in a country of 300 million. |
Look into how Dunbar's number works, and why a log doesn't really work with it. Dunbar's number is really more like going over a credit limit.
And no... the US and Australia aren't similar in nearly anything you wrote there.
Though most specifically.... similar in Multiculturism?
90% of Austrlia's Population is from Europeon descent, not sure how familiar you are with your countries history, but up until about 1970 there was an unpleasent little group called the "White Australia" party that more or less kept out non europeons. Australia's big population boom coming after WW2 when Europeons left Europe because well... Europe sucked after WW2 for a while.
For the US Non hispanic white people are about 62% of the US population.
That's not even getting into the fact that the two major minority groups of either country (If you can call the minority groups in austrlia "major" ) are at the low end on the other side of the pond.
The US and Austrla are about as far apart as can be multiculturism wise, due to the fact that their former racist policies were largely different due to the need in the US for cheap agricultural work.
There are very few countries that can match the US in multiculutralism, and the few that can don't have remotely the same kind of race dynamic due to their multiculturalism happening recently.
Only country I can really think of is I think Luxembourg.
