Let us assume for purposes of this discussion that “better off” is not based on anything indefinable, cultural or spiritual, but is based on the truism, “It is better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick.”
I’m going to go out on a crazylimb here and say that you are not going to find a single accurate “measurement” for what country’s better than another, even limiting your scope to material wealth.
GDP tells us nothing about how happy the citizens are with their lives. I contend that at a certain point it makes us less happy as a people and not more. To paraphrase Fight Club, we work long hours at jobs we hate so we can buy shit that we don’t need.
One of the greatest frauds perpetuated on humanity is the consumer culture.
I would certainly agree with that. I have lived in several different countries; travelled to many more; and I could not say I find one country better than any other in every respect. Each country has its advantages and disadavantages.
Without consumer culture, would we be sitting here at our privately-owned PCs posting messages via our monthly-fee Internet links, and (to paraphrase Bertrand Russell’s remarks on the dying art of general conversation) exercising our highest faculties for an entirely evanascent purpose?
It’s not an unambiguous evil, I’m not saying we should all become like the Amish. I’m an advocate of enoughism: The theory that there is a point where consumers possess everything they need, and by buying more it actually makes their life worse off.
Something else. Instead of fancy measurements, let the people decide what they think is best. People vote with their feet. The countries that rank the highest of where people from the rest of the world wish to immigrate to are better of. The countries that are the largest source of where people chose to emigrate from are the worst shitholes. Both in relation to something like population size.
I tend to think along lines of Infant mortality, maternal mortality, literacy, longevity, incarceration rates, felony rates, execution rates, and other such obvious factors that limit your enjoyment of life.
Sadly, The US doesn’t lead in any of those statistics.
That’s pretty meaningless outside areas of gross difference.
There is clearly no right or perhaps even best measure. It would seem to me one has to take a hypothesis of some preferred result - state it clearly, and then use a combination of the indices cited to try to objectively measure.
It’s not a perfect measure, because many countries restrict the number of immigrants they let in, at least from certain countries. Also, I think there are still some countries that restrict the number of emigrants they let out.
Yes. Net immigration, though the problem is that is distorted by migration policies, and illegal migration is (for instance) easier from Mexico to the United States than from Indonesia to Australia.
Why is it sad that the US doesn’t lead in any of those statistics? Someone’s gotta lead in any given statistic; is is sad for everyone who doesn’t?
I’d say that above a certain level, it’s fine. Just because somewhere else has a higher statistical score in some area than, say, Iceland, doesn’t mean that it’s sad that Iceland doesn’t lead. Iceland’s score may still be perfectly within the the scope of “pretty darn good and perfectly acceptable”.
Pretty meaningless. Some countries will dominate public perception because they dominate international focus. Or, if people in some third-world shithole would want to immigrate anywhere, they’d say they would want to go to the US, because that’s all they know from movies and TV.
I’ve had discussions with such people claiming the US had free universal healthcare, for Og’s sake.
Because you don’t have to cross any water wider than the Rio Grande to get from Mexico to the U.S., or because Australian immigration laws are more strictly enforced?
