[altonzheng]

Very interesting, I would love to see level-headed discussion on this, although it might be politically fraught. I'm curious how these two axes were decided, if anyone knows.

Also, it makes me wonder about cultural relativism, since it seems there's this implicit sense of "progress" by the way the map was constructed. It lines up with my values, but is that my Western bias?

[1996]

It is stats 101, or maybe 201: simply the first 2 principal components in a PCA.

That is acceptable as they accounted for 70% of the explained variance, as explained in the wikipedia entry.

If you want, you can also use the first 3 PC and do a 3d plot on (x,y,z) - it is rarely used as most people have problem visualizing groups with more than 2 dimensions. It could separate countries like Japan, which end up in an interesting position.

To address your second question, if there was any "cultural relativism", it would have been in the question asked.

But when you take the answers to whatever questions, do a PCA and find the PC that explain a large part of the variance, you abstract away any cultural relativism.

You could critique the name used for the axis (it depends on the correlation structure), but not the axis themselves (they comes from mathematical results)