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Debate:Relationship between Socialism and athletic performance (view source)
Revision as of 23:20, February 25, 2010
, 23:20, February 25, 2010→Canada embarrasses itself at Olympics
To sum it up, my personal point of view is that, while it is absurd to believe that social and economic policies have no effect whatsoever on the agonistic performance of countries at Olympic Games, their effect is subordinated to others; and as for the moral and religious values, I believe their effect on the athletic performance of a country to be marginal. --[[User:Maquissar|Maquissar]] 18:04, 25 February 2010 (EST)
To sum it up, my personal point of view is that, while it is absurd to believe that social and economic policies have no effect whatsoever on the agonistic performance of countries at Olympic Games, their effect is subordinated to others; and as for the moral and religious values, I believe their effect on the athletic performance of a country to be marginal. --[[User:Maquissar|Maquissar]] 18:04, 25 February 2010 (EST)
:Maquissar, are you Italian? 0,5% is hard to perceive in the US, where we use a decimal point instead, like so: 0.5%
:Of course prosperity and altheticism are related, but so are many other factors. To say that something is statistically significant does not always reveal a clear causal pattern (e.g. it has been shown, for example, that the historical length of womens' skirts and the performance of the stock market is statistically correlated, but this does not mean that every woman wearing a skirt of a given length will guarantee a certain stock market performance). We need better weighting criteria, as it were. For example, the Spaniards may not do so well at the Winter Olympics simply due to their Mediterranean climate.
:How has Spain done historically at the Summer Olympics? Has it gotten worse since 2000 (Zapatero's rise to power began around then)? There are two data points to compare with previous performance.
:I have one slight qualm with this analysis, however. The popularity of a sport within a given country is very dynamic. It is reasonable to assume that popularity spreads more than it dies off, so around the world we should see a general increase in performance (to human limits) in a given sport as time goes on (barring lulls in performance, which certainly do occur). Thus, if we note that a particular country like Spain has fared worse under Socialist politics, it is possible that this is due to the increased competition in the sport as popularity increases and more countries train better teams as the years go by, rather than to Socialist politics. In order to really show the effect of political tendencies on athleticism, such a characteristic must hold very broadly, which has yet to be demonstrated here. [[User:DanieleGiusto|DanieleGiusto]] 18:20, 25 February 2010 (EST)