Do Richer Countries Win More Olympic Medals?
Statistics & Probability
Test whether a country's GDP predicts its Olympic medal count, using real medal-table and GDP data you look up yourself.
Introduction
Every Olympics, commentators note that richer countries tend to dominate the medal table. This exploration turns that observation into a testable claim: take medal counts from a recent Olympics alongside GDP (or GDP per capita, or population) for the same countries, and test how strong the correlation actually is. Try more than one explanatory variable and compare which one predicts medals better.
Guiding Questions
- Plot medal count against GDP for all competing countries. Does the pattern look linear, or does something else fit better?
- Calculate Pearson's r for medals versus GDP, then repeat for GDP per capita and for population. Which variable correlates most strongly?
- Find the countries that most outperform or underperform what GDP alone predicts. What explains the outliers?
- Fit a regression line and use it to predict medal count for a country not in your data set. How far off is the prediction, and why?
- What confounding factors could make the correlation misleading, and how would you account for them?