difference only 26%... guess you should move to Qatar or Luxembourg though -- but when you're not rich from oil or moving large sums of bank money around, that high GDP is not actually helping, is it?
Wow, that article looks pretty bogus. Here are their factors:
2. Family life: Divorce rate. My parents are divorced and they both seem pretty happy. This metric seems very biased and not clearly beneficial. Is it better to keep an unhappy marriage together or to create two new happier marriages?
3. Community life: country has either high rate of church attendance or trade-union membership. Seriously? Apparently freelancing atheists are miserable.
6. Climate and geography: Latitude, to distinguish between warmer and colder climates. It's ridiculous to claim that latitude is a prime determiner of quality-of-life. Some people prefer tropical beaches, but others love changing seasons and still others like ice fishing. As far as climate and geography are concerned, would you rather live in a Saharan desert or Crete? Places with similar latitudes can have vastly different climates, anyways.
7. Job security: Unemployment rate. Fair enough, but low unemployment rate isn't necessarily an indicator of job security: there could still be high churn. Also, a nation that provides a sufficient level of services means that the unemployed are never too badly off, while a country that provides none could see its few unemployed living in misery. Serious question: would a country with single-worker households have an unemployment rate near 50%?
9. Gender equality: Measured using ratio of average male and female earnings. Terrible. Does this even factor in number of hours worked? It certainly doesn't account for differences in the work being performed or for cultural differences.
By my count, about half of those metrics are crap. Creating an index from that is basically hokum. Anyone could tweak the metrics to almost arbitrarily reorder the rankings.
> 9. Gender equality: Measured using ratio of average male and female earnings. Terrible. Does this even factor in number of hours worked? It certainly doesn't account for differences in the work being performed or for cultural differences.
This is still a useful metric, cultural reasons or not. Half of the world's population are women.
The problem I have with it is that it implies quality-of-life is tied to earnings. That's like saying a single mother working two jobs has a better quality of life than a rich socialite. I know plenty of women who are perfectly happy to be homemakers, work part-time during the day, or teach so that they can enjoy family life.
"Gender equality" the way they measure it here seems to be saying that men and women should ideally live the same. Freedom of choice and equal rights is what matters, and I don't feel that this metric even comes close to measuring that.
Money is a good first approximation of freedom and independence however. And while the extremes you used to illustrate might indeed be uncommon, when we talk about statistics in magnitude of national populations they are not going to distort overall picture.
Yeah that it's nice that Germany might be more efficient, but we're still > 4 times their size. When we're talking about country "power" no one cares about efficiency.
As for Quality of Life, that's fine, but I love America and I love our lifestyle, so perhaps that's more of a personal choice than an aggregated one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomin...
USA GDP - 14.2 T Germany GDP - 3.3 T