Citius, Altius, Dorkius

I always feel ambivalent about the Olympic Games. Though once an exaltation of individual achievement, today’s games are a spectacle of mindless patriotism. Nations march in the opening ceremonies. National flags are plastered on every athlete. National anthems grace every medal ceremony. But individuals compete. Sure, it’s fun to root for the USA, but it’s hard to see how something like Michael Phelps’ streak of record-breaking races is any sort of national accomplishment. It’s a victory for Phelps, for his team and his trainers, but I sure didn’t sacrifice much on behalf of my country to help him win eight gold medals.

Yet, at every Olympics, the boosterism continues, with the total medal count the favored indicator of national greatness. This year, of course, it is a portent of our geopolitical future: today the Chinese win the Olympics, tomorrow they win the world economy!

On the other hand, incredible human achievements still lie beneath the shlocky crust of national pride. Plus, this year’s games brought our increasingly irrelevant and oddly endearing President out in force, which more than makes up for all the spectators wearing goofy Uncle Sam hats.

Most important, although the medal count ought to be an irrelevant indicator, it’s not. The modern Olympics have always been political, and so has the medal count. That makes it a fun statistic to slice and dice. The New York Times did so recently with a neat medal-count cartogram, and the BBC recalculated the rankings based on things like population and GDP.

Interesting — but not quite geeky enough for me. So, with the help of Google Docs, I cooked up a gapminder animated chart comparing medal count numbers to some of the World Bank’s development indicators. Check it out below (you’ll have to click through).

The dataset is available here, and a lighter, embedded chart is available here (no thanks to WordPress!). Medal count data was imported from an Excel spreadsheet prepared by Chandoo, who graciously copy-pasted every medal count since 1896 from the IOC website and posted the data on his blog. Other indicators were imported from a World Bank DDP query. The 2008 medal count came from the official website around 10pm EST last night, so it’s already changed a bit.

Bear a few things in mind when using the chart. First, World Bank data is unavailable before 1960, so development indicators can only be compared to medal counts for recent Olympic games. However, data on medal counts (that includes the total number of medals awarded at the Olympics, the number of medals awarded to each country, and the “medal share,” or percent of all medals won by each country) goes back all the way to 1896, so these data can be compared before 1960.

Second, the Olympics are held every four years, but development indicators are included for every year. The chart extrapolates medal counts in non-Olympics years, so if you care about accuracy, check out the dataset for exact values, or make sure you’ve scrolled the time slider to an Olympic year (for an example of this, check out the U.S. medal count between 1903 and 1905, graphed against the year).

Finally, any errors in the data are my own, and likely the result of furious copy-pasting between various sources. I’ve checked it as best I can, but if you see something crazy, let me know, and I’ll do my best to fix it. Enjoy!

Critical massacre

Real Clear Politics points to a peculiar contrarian op-ed by Gregory Clark in Monday’s Japan Times, arguing that despite the iconic images and powerful press surrounding the 1989 student protests in Beijing, there is “overwhelming evidence that there was no Tiananmen Square massacre.” An excerpt from his revised history:

“True, much that happened elsewhere in Beijing that night was ugly. The regime had allowed prodemocracy student demonstrators to occupy its historic Tiananmen Square for almost three weeks, despite the harm and inconvenience caused. Twice, senior members of Deng Xiaoping’s regime had tried unsuccessfully to negotiate compromises with the students. Unarmed troops sent in to clear the square had been turned back by angry crowds of Beijing civilians.

“When armed troops were finally sent in, they too met hostile crowds, but they kept advancing. Dozens of buses and troop-carrying vehicles were torched by the crowds, some with their crews trapped inside. In the panicky fighting afterward, hundreds, maybe even thousands, of civilians and students were killed. But that was a riot, not a deliberate massacre. And it did not happen in Tiananmen Square. So why all the reports of a ‘massacre’?”

He goes on to contend that the most popular and widely printed account of the events in Tiananmen square, this article allegedly written by a Chinese student and reprinted in The New York Times, “was very likely the work of U.S. and British black information authorities ever keen to plant anti-Beijing stories in unsuspecting media,” and that Nick Kristof’s later account of the incident was more accurate but “buried on an inside page” by his editors. Has the free world been hoodwinked about Tiananmen by China-haters for two decades?

Doubtful. It’s not too much of a stretch to accept that the Tiananmen massacres were messier than popularly portrayed — not in terms of lives lost, but in terms of responsibility for them. After all, rarely is a popular struggle a clear-cut conflict between virtuous freedom fighters and evil opressors, especially when it becomes violent, as Tiananmen did once the PLA began to move in. But it’s also hard to fault the media for a modicum of inaccuracy or exaggeration — did the Party really think that cutting off the cameras just as the bloodshed began would prevent the rest of the world from imagining the worst? The fault for any “massacre myths” ought to fall far more heavily on a censorious Chinese government rather than the scattered reporters who relied only on their own observations of a massive, confusing, and dangerous incident, later pieced together into coherent copy and rushed to publication.

Ultimately, I think Kristof tells an objective story in his account of Tiananmen:

“This reporter saw troops fire on and kill people on the Avenue of Eternal Peace on the northern part of the square as well as some who were on a segment of the square just north of the avenue, near the Tiananmen Gate. But there is no firm indication that troops fired on the students occupying the monument in the middle of the square.”

Fair enough. But save for the historians, why should anyone care about the specific spot where student protesters were slaughtered?  In the wake of the incident, the Chinese government itself confirmed 241 casualties, and even the U.S. diplomatic documents that Clark curiously uses to try to discredit conventional accounts of the killings note that “reports of deaths from the military assault on Tiananmen range from 180 to 500.” Spin that as you please, but there’s no escaping the fact that hundreds of protestors gunned down anywhere is nothing less than a massacre. There is no lower bound beneath which indiscriminate and brutal slaughter are acceptable. History is a complicated thing that has its blemishes, but allowing them to discredit the overall story only makes the best account of the incident an enemy of the good ones.