North American politics are exhausting. It seems like everybody bows to corporate interests, and that there is a disturbingly large proportion of public policy that doesn’t follow sound logical/scientific reasoning. I don’t like to see policy that’s disproportionately favourable to increasing specific people’s revenue, or made for the sake of pandering to a group of voters. The old boys clubs and cronyism that exists in public institutions like police departments infuriates me as well.
I’m thinking of getting away from this part of the world.
I lived in Great Britain for a little while, and they seem to be equally troubled, with a lot of politics operating below-the-level.
There certainly have to be some countries that are better than others in these respects. I read recently that Switzerland and Finland have both instituted speeding fines that are proportional to income, so that the less-wealthy aren’t disproportionately penalized. This seems like the sort of good idea that would never fly in this part of the world, and I’m getting the impression that countries like those, and Sweden and the Netherlands have governments that would be better suited to my tastes.
Does anybody know enough about such places that they’d be able to tell me where I should be thinking about moving to?
Despite some questionable data-collection procedures, the top rankings on the world corruption index correlate almost perfectly with the way I’d rank countries for desirability. I’m a little sad to see Canada so high up on that list though - I was hoping that there’d be far better places.
A smaller country would be better - like Luxembourg, perhaps - because when the population is small, the big corporations are more well-known and localized. A country that wields less power internationally, trades less and is more economically diversified would also be better. (This excludes Norway, since we’re a fairly single-issue economy and trade heavily, rendering us fundamentally unstable.)
So I’d say countries like the Netherlands, Iceland, Luxembourg, Finland or New Zealand would be worth looking into.
One thing to remember is that countries that score well on governance tend to be small societies that have high levels of trust and shared social norms and mores. This allows governments to function with fewer special interests and a better sense of shared purpose. However, the same shared social norms and mores mean that there is less diversity and it is harder for outsiders to fit in.
Peter Munk seems to think that Canada has an exceptionally low rate of corruption. I sometimes wonder how bad corruption is in other countries. I keep hearing stories about how bribery is par for the course in so many nations, but here in Canada it seems that one can reasonably expect to never have to bribe anyone, ever.
Why are you sad to see Canada’s ranking? I think you may be misreading the table - the higher the score, the less corrupt that country is perceived to be, as explained by the web-page of Transparency International, the source of the data used in the wiki article:
Canada is currently graded 8.7 out of 10, which puts it in the top 10 of countries perceived to have the least corrupt pubic sector - why does that sadden you?
(Yes, I am aware that there are some serious methodological issues with Transparency International’s ranking systems, but until something better comes along, it’s what we’ve got.)