Where these numbers come from.
The question is: how well do people work out their differences of opinion? It is asked six times, about six seats at the table, in this order — the world, your country, your state, your town, your family, you. Each one is rated from 1, not at all, to 5, very well.
Everyone who answers is a reader of this book who chose to answer. That is not a sample of anything. It is self-selected, it skews toward people who just gave an author their email address, and it should be read that way.
The seats are asked from the world inward, and that order matters. Answering about the world first tends to lift the answers that come later. A version that asked from the inside out would produce different numbers. This one does not correct for that.
This is not a survey and it does not measure political division. It asks about differences of opinion, in general, and the phrasing is deliberately broad. What it shows is what readers of this book said.
Counting from the first answer.
Answers are stored without an email address, an IP address, a user agent, or any other identifier. The store behind these numbers is separate from the mailing list and the two are never joined. A state with fewer than five answers is not shown on its own and the national figure stands in, because one determined person visibly moves a small state. Between five and twenty-five its figure appears with the count and a caution attached. The floor was twenty-five until 26 August 2026 and was lowered deliberately, because a threshold that shows a reader nothing for a year is its own kind of dishonesty. It is recorded here rather than quietly changed.