Week 9 Lab Report

Lab Group: Steffen Seamon, Simon Cohen

Date of Inquiry: 10-18-18

Capitalocene Lab Week 9

Background

In the ninth week of our lab, we continued to analyze the possible effects and validity of the capitalocene. The first and second weeks of our lab included look at Yale Environmental Performance Indicators (EPI) and World Bank statistics to measure whether the capitalocene behaved in the manner we read about in articles by Daniel Hartley and Jason Moore. In summary, those authors theorized that capitalism pushes us to prioritize profit over anything, including the wellbeing of the environment. This week we looked at data from the World Values Survey to begin to understand how individuals values contribute to the potential existence of the capitalocene. The World Values Survey is a massive survey that has asked a number of questions pertaining to all sorts of topics to thousands of people from most countries in the world. We looked at two statistics that pertained to the capitalocene. Those were whether “looking after the environment is important to this person; to care for nature and save life resources” and people’s priority regarding “protecting environment versus economic growth.” By investigating those statistics across different income groups we hoped to understand how wealth changed how people value their environment.

Procedure

First we chose three countries to represent three separate income groups. We chose Germany (high income), Morocco (lower middle income), and Haiti (low income). Then we selected two statistics from the World Values Survey to compare these countries by. We chose V78, whether “looking after the environment is important to this person; to care for nature and save life resources” and V81, people’s priority regarding “protecting environment versus economic growth.” Me made two histograms for each country to represent their citizen’s answers to the survey questions. Then we calculated the mean and standard deviation for each statistic for each country and graphed the countries against each other. We hypothesized that there would not be a strong correlation between the importance of the environment and a country’s wealth. We hypothesized that that an increase of wealth would cause a country to care more about protecting the environment. For the first statistic, our hypothesis was close to the null hypothesis meaning that we expected not to find a significant correlation. Then we did t tests to calculate the probabilities for the correlation of wealth and these variables.

Results

V78 – looking after the environment is not important (higher values indicate indifference towards the environment) 

V81 – environmental protection (1) vs. economic growth (2)

This table shows the means and standard deviations for the two variables we studied across the three countries.

This table shows the probability that the difference in means between these pairs of countries for the two variables is statistically significant. The incredibly low probabilities mean that the difference in means is statistically significant meaning that for all the pairs we can reject the null hypothesis that there is no correlation between these variables and wealth.

Discussion

Our data does not do much to prove or refute the existence of the capitalocene. In this lab, we only looked at three countries. It would be a stretch to use our results as a sample to apply to all countries. Although we chose countries from three different income groups, we cannot assume that these countries are representative of their respective groups. If we wanted our results to be more significant we could have taken a representative sample of the income groups we wanted to study. Our results prove our hypothesis that there is no trend between income group and whether “looking after the environment is important to this person; to care for nature and save life resources” for the countries we studied. There is also no trend between the three countries regarding importance of economic growth versus environmental protection. For the very limited sample that we have we can say that wealth does not affect how people value the environment. This lack of correlation is similar to what we found in our last two labs. The last two weeks we looked at quantitative statistics and this week we looked at values. Neither those statistics nor the assessment of values pointed to the existence of a capitalocene. Of course more research could be done to get more accurate results. However, as of now, our comparison of countries has not yielded to prove or disprove the existence of a capitalocene.