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Comment by tda | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how many plausible alternative captions we can come up with for this map? A few takes: * Corruption level (blue is less) * Income per capita (blue is more) * Education level (blue is better) * Price of a beer (blue is more) * etc

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Just overlay a map of median temperatures and you'll have some interesting insight.

The map of Protestants and Catholics is the one that leaps out at me as aligning quite closely:

Religion: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_Catholicism,_...

Unemployment: http://thesoundingline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/EU-and...

What's the insight? Historically those areas in the southern Mediterranean have been harder to defend / had more diversity / immigration / general variables. Is this what you're referring to?

I'm not sure how much a simple median would tell you. My instinct is that how much the climate varies over the year might be as or more important than the point average.

Education?. Really?.

"Regarding Europe’s other large countries, the proportions were 47.1% for Britain, 31.9% in Germany (which retains a strong tradition of technical education), 43.6% in France, 40.1% in Spain and 39.1% in Poland."

http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=2013041...

As you already imply with Germany: One big problem I have with educational statistics is that they are usually completely ignoring the value of dual education systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_education_system

From that article Ireland is the most highly educated country in Europe, I never would have guessed that.

Thinking about it I'm not that surprised - the population is very small, and most people can/do avail of free third-level education.

That's not the reason for it. Rather, there's a very high premium put on having third-level education in Ireland as it was historically one of the ways to get out of poverty, even if that meant emigrating elsewhere. We could do with more people actually doing vocational courses on the German model, but owing to shifts in our economy, that's not as popular as it once was.

Also, education in Ireland isn't quite free. Sure, it's inexpensive compared to, say, the US, but the important thing is that access to third-level institutions is radically egalitarian, practically to a fault, owing to how entrance into third-level education works, based on a points score from your top six subjects in your final second-level exams.

Third level education was free until recently and is still far, far cheaper than cost. It's also a fairly wealthy country.

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