[monk_keys]

I thought this data set was pretty interesting and might spark some debate.

It ranks countries by statistics on things like unemployment and level of democracy. Off-gold colour is the best, grey is average, light red is bad and dark red is worst. Countries with the most off-gold are at the top.

http://flowingdata.com/2011/02/22/am...at-everything/

The article obviously has an anti-American bias, and I wouldn't be surprised if the 'various measures' were chosen specifically to place America at the bottom.

What do you think the glaring omissions are? There's no mention of health, obesity or crime, presumably because they are simply harder to get good data for.

I was quite surprised by the gap between Germany (5) and France (24)

Data is from 2011.

[aftrglw]

I thought this post was going to be something else. Health, obesity, and crime are things that you can get decent data for... at least as much as you can measure the 'level of democracy' or 'wellbeing'. However, in obesity the US is probably far worse off than most of those countries and I'd guess in terms of crime it's probably somewhat average. The problem with measuring crime is what you count as a crime. The US would probably seem worse on things like sexually-related crimes, because they have higher levels of consent and stricter laws against prostitution and what counts as harassment. Their drug laws are stricter in some ways than many Euro countries, too. That will change statistics like that. Healthcare would depend on how it was defined: the quality of healthcare in the US for a complicated procedure is really high, and you won't need to wait if you have a decent job with decent insurance, but obviously there isn't really a socialized healthcare system, so it's not available to everyone. That said, it could be argued that prison population to some extent is a measure of crime, and life expectancy at birth is primarily included as a measure of healthcare quality.

It is obviously a biased study in what it chose to rank on. I don't think it's a surprise to any educated person that the US is ranked poorly on prison population or income inequality - in part because of the way our democracy works... it is very beneficial for politicians (including judges and DAs, who are also elected) to be 'tough on crime'. We have a lot of billionaires and millionaires as well, because our GDP per capita is one of the highest in the world and the majority of technological and healthcare innovation is done in America. Obviously, statistics which would play to America's strengths more are things like GDP per capita, military capacity, innovation if you could measure it (perhaps percentage of patents issued relative to population), healthcare if measured by more complex procedures, perhaps percentage of people considered to be in the middle class or higher... whether you think those are relevant or not is open to debate, of course. I'm not so upset by the gap between Germany and France, but I think Singapore is a bit inflated. Where Singapore is bad (democracy, well-being, income inequality) it's absolutely horrible. Obviously, it puts things far more in perspective for all countries to include countries which are not considered to have 'advanced economies', too.

[Nihilum]

Yet more jealousy in the face of the perfect country.

[Aaron_xyz]

It would have been better if the stats were graphed as a gradient.

[vvbox]

interesting stat