As part of a management course I’m taking I learned more about the Hofstede model of Individualism and Collectivism. Individualistic societies, with the USA leading the way, tend to value individualism over the collective good. These tendencies have been discussed as impacting the success with which different countries could implement lockdowns and universal masking. As part of an exercise contrasting behaviors, I listed 14 countries from which I have had close friends.
I thought it would be interesting to compare these countries’ index of individualism (IDV) with their success in controlling deaths from Covid19. I removed Serbia and Croatia as they were significant outliers. In the remaining 12, there was a 78% correlation between total deaths per million people and the individualism score.
