We briefly mentioned that a significant factor in how many
grandmasters and international masters a country has is
population. While it is splendid that FIDE publishes rankings, it
has become useful to distinguish whether a player is active, and, if
so, successful. What is disappointing is that success in chess is
rarely the result of academic training, and that it is difficult to tie
positive chess results to something with applicability - like
economics. In statistics correlation is symmetric so one cannot
determine if a vibrant economy causes great chess players to
flourish or hard work and diligent application over the board
produce glittering trans-national financial results.
Currently, a great many economic measures are only estimated at
the national level. This makes associating expenses and revenues
with states (sub-countries), much less cities, very difficult. There
are endless debates about what exactly a city is, but with more
attention to continuous counting and attonomics one could assess
the economic contributions of cities like Libreville, Maputo and
Bandar-Abbas without the tragedy of having a city destroyed by an
earthquake and tsunamis. We start by dividing a number of
national estimates by population to obtain per capita comparisons.