Is Your Country the Best for Human Well-Being?

Probably Not.

In our last episode, we looked at alternative measurements to GDP.

·        Genuine Progress Indicator

·        Human Development Index

·        Better Life Index

·        Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare

·        The Good Country Index

·        The Social Progress Index

·        Gross National Happiness

I couldn’t find rankings on the GPI, but the ISEW is relatively similar, so that works out fine. The numbers for the ISEW are a little stale, from 2018, but they are likely not far off from what they would be today. Gross National Happiness is just tracked at the country level by Bhutan, and a few others, so it isn’t very useful yet. Also, not all countries are covered in all indices. For example, China and India are not in the ISEW or BLI, so those countries only appeared in 4 of the 6 indices below. I’ve taken GDP and five of the other alternative indices and listed the top 12 countries in each index.

I then pulled out a handy spreadsheet and ranked all the countries from lowest score to highest score for each index. I then determined the average score across all indices for each country. The results are below. The score of each country is the average ranking of that country across the six indices I looked at.

If you are interested, China and India, heavyweights in terms of GDP, finished in 27^th and 29^th place respectively.

It isn’t surprising to see countries from Europe dominating the list, as these countries tend to have more generous social policies and more stringent environmental regulations.  If you take out the US ranking of #1 for GDP, the US would fall out of the top 20, down to #24. The United States ranked anywhere from 8^th to 46^th in the other 5 indicators.

This goes to show how GDP dominates our perception of success.

It may be unfair to use five other indicators alongside GDP in this exercise, which dilutes the importance of GDP. However, even if you just chose one of the other indicators alongside GDP, the US, China, Japan, and India would all fall well outside the top 5, with Germany, the only GDP powerhouse that performs consistently well on the other indicators.

I only have a few subscribers from our winner Switzerland. Maybe that’s because they have this thing figured out. I’ve been to Switzerland a few times, and I have to admit, life there seems pretty nice. If you are not Swiss and don’t want to hate where you live, don’t read this.

If you are too lazy to read it here is a summary:

1. Great work-life balance

2. Had time and money

3. Good unemployment system

4. Progressive tax system

5. Lots of paid vacation

6. No need for a car

7. Efficient and dependable public transportation

8. Excellent health care for all

9. Fourteen-week maternity leave.

Switzerland, and the other Northern European at the top of this list all have generous social services and decent if not very good environmental laws. But they still have their problems. They will all still need to embrace degrowth in some form to get to a sustainable way of life. But if we made Switzerland our baseline, (which we can if we want to adopt the Swiss policies), we’d all be starting from a better place.

On second thought, do read this and ask why you can’t have that too.