Crickets Chirping

I was hanging out with some friends at Dolores park this weekend, and one of our rambling conversations was about which countries have the most sex. My guess was Brazil. No reason really, they just seem to party a lot. Then someone else brought up a related question: how would that ranking relate to overall economic productivity of each country?

Like, if they’re too busy having sex all the time to work, maybe they don’t do so well economically. Or if they’re repressed and don’t get laid enough they aren’t motivated to work.

Still curious a couple of days later, I gathered some data available freely on the web to answer these very important questions.

Data on sexual frequency and satisfaction are from the 2006 Durex Sexual Wellbeing Survey.

Data on 2006 GDP for the same 26 countries is from the World Bank.

Sorry the data is kind of old but at least they’re both from the same year. And my guess of Brazil having the most sex was almost right- they’re #2. Greece is #1.

I combined the data sets manually into a google spreadsheet (the Durex survey data is served up in a flash app, which is, like, totally annoying, so please appreciate my work here :). You can view the combined dataset spreadsheet here. 26 countries are covered.

Without further ado, some charts:

Quality of sex doesn’t seem to correlate.

Quantity doesn’t either.

There appears to be little correlation between frequency and satisfaction too, especially if you take out Japan (the lonely one in the lower left):

Anyways, I’m glad we had this little chat and I hope you learned something you can share with the other kids at the playground.

UPDATE: Chris points out that it makes little sense to compare overall GDP since the population sizes vary so greatly. So here are the same charts, corrected for per-capita GDP:

Still no correlation.