Richard Florida, an influential scholar of urban studies, has uncovered a direct relationship between open-mindedness, tolerance, creativity and economic output of American cities. In his book The Rise of the Creative Class he finds that cities with big gay communities enjoy higher levels of prosperity, attract many skilled professionals and manage to build a solid talent base: “Places that a large gay and lesbian community gravitated to, a large group of musicians and other open minded people gravitated to. When these kind of geeky entrepreneurs became important economic growth, those were the places that accepted them, too.”
Simultaneously, OECD Society at a Glance 2011 examines tolerance among member countries and concludes that richer countries have more acceptable communities:
For this reason I embark on constructing an exhaustive index of tolerance for gay people among countries. This index is based on data from major social surveys and lies in the range [0...1], where higher values signify more tolerance for gay people.
The results are shown below:
Three top- and three bottom-performing countries
| Country | LGBT Tolerance Index |
| Sweden | 0.92 |
| Netherlands | 0,91 |
| Denmark | 0,87 |
| ... | |
| China | 0,08 |
| Romania | 0,08 |
| Indonesia | 0,02 |
LGBT Tolerance throughout the world
Data note
The Index can be accessed here. It is constructed from adaptively weighted results of the following country-wide surveys:
- European Social Survey Round 4 (core question B31: “Share of people who agree and agree strongly that gays and lesbians are free to live life as they wish”),
- Gallup World Poll 2010 (Question WP105: “% of respondents who claim that a city or area where they live is a good place for gay or lesbian people”),
- World Values Survey 5 (Question: “Is homosexuality justifiable?”),
- Expedia.com share of LGBT-welcoming hotels in the largest city as of June, 10 2011.