Trade and Markets

Everyone's talking about this Pew report's demonstration of an inverse correlation between national wealth and national religiosity, complete with a big-time outlier for the USA, but I'm more interested in their findings on globalization. Specifically, check out this chart I made using their data just from rich countries on public attitudes toward "trade" and toward "free markets." Basically, there's no correlation here at all, which is pretty contrary to the tenor of public debate wherein trade skeptics tend to be skeptics about the virtues of the market more generally.

In public opinion, though, the main trend seems to be that smaller countries are more enthusiastic about trade -- presumably because people can see the downsides to reduced trade more clearly in places with smaller internal markets and more classes of goods that would be totally unavailable absent imports.