america

Over 10 years ago I wrote an article called What differentiates Europeans from Americans: the cultural gap across the Atlantic. I last updated it 5 years ago to add some more differences I had forgotten. One thing I did not mention, as it's not strictly speaking a difference between the US and...

Tax rates vary hugely between countries. When it comes to personal income tax, some countries have flat rates regardless of income size, while others have progressive rates. But while some progressive rates start from 0%, others start much higher (like in Belgium, from 25%). Some countries have...

GDP per capita is often used as a proxy to determine how much people earn in average in a country. In many cases it can be a relatively good approximation, but sometimes it's completely wrong. This is because the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is a measure of all the money produced in a country...

I have been meaning to start a thread like this for many years. I thought it might be too provocative, but I see how many Americans themselves are dissatisfied with their own country and the situation seems to be getting constantly worse. To many outside observers it has been clear for quite...

I have made two new maps. The first one represents the total number of civilian firearms in a country divided by the population. It is not the same as the gun ownership rate (second map), as some individuals own more than one gun. In the USA there are over 120 firearms for 100 people, by the...

Pew Research has just published a new survey asking questions about basic knowledge relating to international geography and politics. Here are the questions and the percentage of respondents who got the answer right. It's sad that one third of Americans can't recognise the euro sign! It's not...

Which of these two decade checks off more of what you would consider a Golden Era for the West? I consider the 70s and onwards as a definite decline in western culture but struggle between those two...

How the Europe Union and NATO pathetic behavior with Ukraine. Ukraine already willing to join eu and NATO and America make many promises with Ukraine but during the war America and NATO didn't help Ukraine. It's time for the world to understand the Hypocritical attitude of America. In history...

I have made four new maps showing the number of American fast food chains per capita in each European country and compared to the United States, India, China and Japan. McDonald's are the most popular in Northern and Western Europe, except in Iceland where the chain withdrew completely from...

The Pew Research Center, one of my favourite think tanks, has surveyed people in 17 advanced economies about the strengths and weaknesses of American society. What People Around the World Like – and Dislike – About American Society and Politics It comes as no surprise to me that technology...

Gallup has been conducting polls about religious beliefs in the USA since the 1930s. For the first time less than 50% of U.S. adults (47%) reported to belong to a church, synagogue or mosque. The non-religious people are not a homogeneous group. There are convinced atheists, uncertain agnostics...

That's not a joke. You read it well. That's what the Belgian economic magazine Trends explains in this article. It concerns mostly accidental Americans, that is foreigners who were born in the US while their parents were working there (usually for a few years as expats) and were automatically...

I researched Wyatt Earp's ancestry on Geni and found that he descends from Joshua Earp (1706-1771). The Earp DNA Project has a lineage descending from Josiah Jackson Earp (1761-1844) and his son Allen Milford Earp (1796-1862). It turns out that Josiah is also Joshua's grandson, so it is the same...

Woodrow Wilson, 28th President of the United States, belonged to haplogroup R1b-P312 > Z30597 (a rare clade) based on the testing of a descendant of his grandfather, Judge James Wilson (1787-1850) at the Wilson DNA Project (Genetic Family ZZN). Wilson served as the president of Princeton...

The haplogroups of Lincoln and Grant have been known for several years. I found Robert E. Lee's lineage last year. In the last few days I endeavoured to trace back the Y-DNA of more famous generals of the US Civil War and summarised my findings here. I searched many others but was only...

I have made a summary of all the known paternal lineages of the Founding Fathers. I wish I could find those of James Madison, John Jay and the Morris family (Gouverneur Morris, Lewis Morris, Richard Morris, etc.).

These two maps show the percentage of foreign-born residents by country in Europe and by state in the United States. In Europe, countries with the highest share of foreigners are Luxembourg (47%) and Switzerland (30%). They also happen to be the richest countries, so it's no surprise that they...

2020 has been a very special year. The Coronavirus has reshaped the global economy. People are working more from home, but also relocating outside of expensive cities as there is no point in being close to one's office any more if teleworking becomes the new normal. As people move less, petrol...

Over the years I have created dozens of maps of Europe to help visualise the cultural, political, socio-economic, legal or lifestyle differences between countries. I thought it would be interesting to make similar maps for the United States, using the same scales and colours to facilitate...

Using data from Wikipedia for 2018, I have created maps of life expectancy by US State. I first compared overall male vs female life expectancy, as it did for Europe (also for 2018). I used the same colour scale for all maps so that the differences are immediately apparent. Let's first compare...