Tatu Westling of the University of Helsinki has gone above and beyond the call of duty to answer one of the world's most pressing questions: is there a correlation between a country's average penile length and its GDP growth rate?
Yes, he concluded — there is.
The (literally) animated chart above shows that the nations with the biggest wangs experienced far slower GDP growth rate than those with mid-sized ones. The lopsided bell curve also indicates that the smaller the country's average penis size, the bigger its GDP growth — unless, evidently, the penises fall below the 4.25-inch threshold, in which case the GDP is likely to grow only slightly more than the most well-endowed countries.
Here is a less goofy chart relaying the same information similar information from 1960:
So why should you care? Or, for that matter, why should anyone care? Because that's just how academia works. "The aim of this paper is to fill this scholarly gap with the male organ," Westling insisted. He continued:
"It started as a half-serious attempt, but frankly speaking I did not expect the correlations to be so robust as they turned out to be. Hence the seriousness increased as the study proceeded, and I may submit it to an economics journal at some point. … Taken at face value the findings suggest that the `male organ hypothesis' put forward here is quite penetrating an argument. Yet for the best of author's knowledge, male organ has not been touched in the growth literature before. … It clearly seems that the `private sector' deserves more credit for economic development than is typically acknowledged."
Well, it's good to see that he's at least having some fun with it.