Countries that focus on the future tend to have a higher per capita GDP, suggests a study published in Nature's Scientific Reports. Using Google Trends, a group of researchers compared the number of searches conducted for calendar years past to those for calendar years to come, and found that residents of countries with higher GDPs tend to search more about the year to come than the one past. Likewise, residents of countries with lower GDPs tend to search about the year past more than the one to come.
To find the correlation, researchers looked at the number of searches people conducted in a given year for both the preceding year and the next year to come; for example, searches about 2008 and 2010 in the year 2009. They called the ratio of these queries the "future orientation index."
The authors divided the results by country, and then graphed the results against the per capita GDP. They found that higher the GDP, the more countries seemed to focus on the future. The UK ($36,421 per capita in 2010) and Germany ($41,455) had a future orientation index favoring the future, while Italy ($35,100) appears to search about past and future years in even ratios. The US is an outlier, with a high GDP ($48,955) but a future orientation index closer to that of Italy. Russia ($8,870) had a future orientation index favoring the past, searching past years almost twice as often as the future.
The study is a bit simplistic, but provides some groundwork to seek out more correlation. The researchers suggest that this correlation means "a focus on the future supports economic success." So who has had the most searches so far this year for "2013"? Canada, followed by the US and Japan. All three have had roughly similar dropoffs in searches for "2011."
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