Nice To Meet You by Elena Paunova

Nice to meet you is about measuring ethnic, linguistic, religious, and cultural heterogeneity in the world. We intuitively understand that what language we are born speaking, what religion we follow and what color we are, predetermine a very significant part of our lives and who we are. The goal is to use this intuition to learn more about different societies via these proxy variables and test if the complexity of each country correlates with its economic outcomes, political system, geographic location, religion, or level of moral freedom. We further employ a clustering algorithm and create a taxonomy that organizes the countries in our world by their shared complexity (heterogeneity vs homogeneity). As a result a new world emerges, one in which our closest neighbors are not the ones sharing our borders but countries located thousands of miles away. The combined analysis and visualization leads us to the conclusion that there is ultimately more that binds us than divides us.