The Social Progress of the Paris Olympics

This week, the closure of the Summer Olympics in Paris left a swath of anecdotes and colorful notes. For us, they also presented a once-in-a-four-year opportunity to test our Social Progress Index with the countries’ performance at the medal table. We wondered whether these elements had a relationship and found some exciting dynamics across different country categories.

To avoid big-countries distortion, we divided the total number of medals each country got by their population measured in millions. By this standard, relatively small countries such as New Zealand and Bahrain performed better at the Olympics than the official top ten. Our first surprise was the utter inequity between countries, which is so ample that we had to use a logarithmic scale to show the results for them to be visible.

Despite this divergence, the Social Progress Index strongly relates to the country’s performance at the Olympics across its different tiers. However, the relation is not linear, as the lowest-performing countries on the Index did much less favorably than higher-performing countries at the Olympics.