OtherWise

11World Values

With his balding head and carefully trimmed chin curtain, the University of Michigan’s Ron Inglehart could easily pass for an Amish farmer, but what he tends is a massive body of empirical data from multiple waves of standardized surveys, fielded over three decades, in countries with nearly 90 percent of the world’s population.

Inglehart directs the World Values Survey, which tracks the beliefs, values, and motivations of people around the world. It covers societies with per-capita incomes of as little as $300 a year to as much as 150 times more—everything from free-market economies to socialized welfare states, from long-established democracies to authoritarian monarchies. It’s a veritable cornucopia of data for social scientists. ...