What more in the name of love?

"We are a proud people."

The Mayans, Japanese, Iraqi, Iranian, Batswana, Latvian, Georgian, Uruguayan, Antarctican, Danish, Chilean, Vulcan, Bolivian, Australian, French, American, and certainly the Monagasque ("We are small but proud!") are all proud people. Is there a nation of the non-proud? Even countries that are officially ashamed are secretly proud. (The hippies and idiot liberals (not all liberals) of the United States are outspokenly ashamed of our country, but damn proud of themselves for being so loudly ashamed. They like to talk about moving to Canada but they will never actually do it.)

(In something of a contradiction, most religions view pride as a sin. But this is generally ignored. Gluttony, in the US at least, is also widely ignored.)

So perhaps all people are a proud people, but not everyone can be equally proud. Usually it is the downtrodden, war-beaten, raped, and indigenous that speak up most about being proud (we're willing to give them that much after we take away their land), but that doesn't make them any more proud than anyone else; it just happens to be all they have left.

What I would like to do is develop a measure of proudness (dealing specifically with National Pride, as opposed to proudness of ethnic, cultural, or familial groups, or of the personal variety.) Voluntary military participation is probably a good starting point; people who are willing to die for their country are probably prouder than people not willing to die for their country:

National Pride (Pn) = Voluntary Military Participation (M) / Population (K)

This is imperfect, however, because a country with a more technologically advanced military doesn't need as many people to keep their country from being taken over by another. So we should control for military might, by multiplying by the amount of military spending per capita:

Pn = (M/K) x (Total Military Spending (S)/K) = MS/K^2

This result is skewed towards countries that are less populous, lack natural borders, and fight a lot. In other words, it is too pro-Israel. To adjust for this, we should adjust based on amount of war activity:

Pn = (MS/K^2) x Wadj = MSWadj/K^2 , where Wadj is the War adjustment factor .

Next, in addition to fighting, there is also a cultural element to National Pride. I think we can reasonably measure this by the amount of flags sold per capita:

Pn= MSWadj/K^2 + Flags Sold (F)/K = MSWadj/K^2+F/K

You might argue that I should adjust for aesthetic quality of the flags, but frankly, if my country had an ugly flag, I'd have less pride as well.

So there you have it. The unit of measure for pride should be Lions. So. By this measure, we can see that the proudest people are the Irish. They have 17,844 Lions of Pride. Plus one Bono.