This book owes large debts to many friends and colleagues. It draws on a unique database, the World Values Survey (WVS) and the European Values Surveys (EVS), conducted from 1981 to 2007. These representative mass surveys provide data from countries comprising almost 90 percent of the world?s population and covering the full range of variation, from societies with per capita incomes as low a $200 per year to societies with per capita incomes more than one hundred times that high, and from long-established democracies with market economies to authoritarian states and former socialist states.