Motivation for asking: mostly just want to improve my model of the world on how global culture and risk of wars are related to each other, and maybe signal that I have the impression it would be valuable to think more about this. answers probably won't be immediately actionable for me, although I might decide to contract someone to calculate the GCI over the years.
Global Communication Score (GCS)
Your global communication score could be the fraction of humans with which you're able to communicate.
As a first approximation, it could be the number of people
You could also have a weighted score, which would weigth speakers according to their proficiency. For simplicity, it would weigh all L2 speakers at 0.5: L1 to L2 and L2 to L1 communication would have a weight of 0.5 and L2 to L2 communication would have a weight of 0.25.
But this is not ideal. A lot of people know someone that speaks their native language and English, more than there are people that know someone that speaks their native language and another language that’s not English.
Is there a concept, possibly from network theory, that could be used to quantify what I’m pointing at?
Global Communication Index (GCI)
The Global Communication Index could be the average Global Communication Score of all humans.
Does this concept already exist?
Translation-adjusted
The goal of the GCI being to measure how well everyone can communicate with each other, we might want to adjust the GCI for how good we are at translating, and how high/low the bar to reading translated material is.
Do you have ideas for how to quantify or qualify this?
Related questions
There are a bunch of related questions, but please use the “Ask Related Question” feature if you want to tackle them.
Sub-questions:
- Could this metric be useful?
- What has been our GCI over the years?
- What are the consequences of a higher GCI?
- What are high-leverage interventions to increase/decrease the GCI?
Super-questions: