What is the best nation on earth? I suppose to determine this you should include happiness, healthiness, how much leisure time, how many below the poverty line, etc.
I assume this nation would be in europe. But of course, I could be wrong. Also, you notice I put this in GQ, because I assume there is some kind of objective way to determine this.
I find it hard to believe I am the first person on these boards to ask this question. But I did a forum search, and after I went thru about 5 search pages (sorry, that’s enough searching for me:)), I came up with nothing. Anyways, it would be near the top and in the title if someone else came up with this question, no? But if anyone else every asked this question, feel free to provide a link here:).
Why would you assume this? My instincts tell me that an objective answer as to the best nation is as ephemeral as an objective answer as to the tastiest food, nicest color, best novel, or any other matter of taste.
Well, I will just say this. Mexico is obviously better than Haiti. And Canada is better than Mexico. So that seems to suggest there is some objective standard that can apply. But please, let the discussion continue from where you left off:). You all said “no objective standard”…
The United States of America because you have a plethora of options available to you as to what you can do with your life. If you don’t like where you are you can just move somewhere else in the country.
As opposed to all those other wealthy industrialized nations that are entirely homogeneous and restrict where you can live. Yes, obviously you are correct.
According to my friends in Sweden, you know that country where everything is perfect from education to healthcare? It’s incredibly difficult to move anywhere because of the way housing is structured. Just a for instance.
It’s relatively easy to move around in the United States.
Did I not agree with you? And now that you’ve bolstered your argument that the US is the best country in the world by providing an anecdote about Sweden’s housing market being somewhat illiquid, I am even more convinced.
It suggests nothing of the kind. The qualities you listed in your OP included “happiness”, which is quite obviously subjective. (If you don’t feel happy, then you’re not happy.) We can compare the [reported] happiness of two countries, but that doesn’t make happiness an objective standard.
Besides, in your attempt to explain what you mean by “best”, you’ve ignored one of the principal meanings of the word (“most virtuous”). When I read the header I thought you were asking which nation was most beneficial to the planet, which had done the most good, but that doesn’t seem to be what you’re after at all. To explain “best” you’ve suggested an apparently arbitrary list of other desirable qualities and rounded it off with an “etc” to indicate that there are still other relevant considerations, but you can’t be bothered to articulate them. And you’ve offered no basis for prioritising them. What if the country which reports itself the happiest also has many people below the poverty line? What if the country which affords its people a great deal of leisure time has poor health?
With such a vaguely defined question, you’re not going to get a useful discussion. What you are likely to find is people picking a nation that they like or admire, and then trying to articulate what the like or admire about that nation, often mentioning qualities which are in fact shared by many nations
Gotta point out that Swedes are not only free to move around, settle, work, study, etc anywhere in Sweden, but that - like all EU nationals - they are free to do this throughout the EU, which has a larger population, and is much more culturally diverse, than the US. If your criterion for “best” is the freedom to go and live somewhere that is unlike where you currently are, you definitely want to be an EU national.
[Joint Irish/Australian national here - so far as moving around goes, it doesn’t get any better than that!]
Instead of moving from GQ to GD, shouldn’t this have moved to IMHO…?
Anyways, I’m going to venture one of the Scandinavian countries. They always tend to cluster towards the top of all those international rankings: good economies, health care systems, vacation times, etc. Canada was for several years at the top of the U.N.'s list of best countries to live in (as practically every Canadian I met managed to tell me within five minutes of being introduced…), but I’d still give the Scandinavian countries an edge because of their greater histories and cultural attractions, and the fact that most Scandinavians have E.U. passports, allowing them to pack up and move to the Mediterranean whenever that strikes their fancy.
A dark horse candidate might be the U.K., because, as English speakers, they are part of one of the key (if not THE key) global languages - plus they get all those E.U. benefits, etc.
Have to back this up. Yes, the US gives you a greater variety of places to move to than most countries in the world, but if we’re looking for the top of the list…? Not even close.
Excuse me? How 'bout pleasant weather? You have nothing that compares to Arizona, California, or Florida. You might argue that Vancouver comes close (it really doesn’t) but it’s also one of your most expensive if not your most expensive large city. You have no city even half as large as New York. You have no desert. You have very little surfing and nothing that approaches a tropical beach.
The US is geographically, culturally, and economically diverse to a greater extent than any other nation I can think of*. We’re not perfect, and I’m sure I personally could be just as happy in any number of other countries, but any objective measure of “best”, for the most people, has to put the US on top.
*I think Brazil might be more ethnically diverse than us but I can’t think of any other large countries that are.
If you’re counting the whole EU as one country then you should count “European” as one culture, in which case I do not think they are as culturally diverse as us.
