Heard a great piece on C-Span on the way back. The Economic Intelligence Unit had put together a Global Peace Index. They were briefing their methodology and fielding questions in D.C.. The discussion was pretty good, but I think a little suspect in the the designers of the index took awhile to admit there was any bias in their assignments of categories, weights and measures to detrmine ranking - when people are involved designing, collecting, analyzing there is always some bias - admitting it helps you guage the impact on the results and helps the audience more easily assimilate it. However, it sounds like they did a reasonable job on a tough issue.
For us, I think to understand the nature of war and its causes, understanding peace would be helpful. Since security is a component of civilization, this data may also be useful in considering our allocation of resources in terms of providing security and stability in relation to our policy.
