Monday 8 December 2014

what's the best country?

The 'Good Country Index' is a good place to start:
The Good Country Index: Ireland crowned the 'goodest' country in the world | Daily Mail Online
Ireland is officially the 'best country in the world', says study - Home News - UK - The Independent
Guess which country does the most good for the planet? | ideas.ted.com
Simon Anholt: Which country does the most good for the world? | Talk Video | TED.com

Or, to put another way:




It produced some reaction:

It was after the launch of that second “goodness” index at another TEDx talk in Germany that Anholt started to develop the idea of his borderless party. His talk was a surprising viral hit. It reached 1m internet views more quickly than any other TEDx talk. And not only that: it prompted hundreds and then thousands of comments and tweets, which Anholt, nothing if not obsessive, devoted days to responding to, one by one. A few things became clear from those comments. First, that Americans, particularly young American men, were often “incoherent with rage” that their nation did not feature in the top 10 of goodness; and second that people – cosmopolitans – from all parts of the world thought it a tremendous start, but what next?
“I didn’t want people to be too fixated on the index itself,” Anholt says. “I get dragged into long conversations about how I assembled the data and really it was a toe in the water to start a debate on how you make nations less selfish.”
"When the Nations Brand Index has discovered some controversial facts, for example that the country that is preferred by all Muslims across the world by a huge margin is the United States..." 


And then there's the idea of forming a Good Country Party:
Jay Doubleyou: the good country party

What about how we treat children in our countries?
How does does your country compare?

This study was carried out by UNESCO in 2007:

An overview of child well-being in rich countries
A comprehensive assessment of the lives and well-being of children and adolescents in the economically advanced nations

The true measure of a nation’s standing is how well it attends to its children – their health and safety, their material security, their education and socialization, and their sense of being loved, valued, and included in the families and societies into which they are born.


Click on this link to see a table which compares these different criteria - and the UK and US come out significantly badly:
www.unicef.org/media/files/ChildPovertyReport.pdf

There are plenty of other statistics about how well we look after our children. 

For example, how many resources they have at school, with Scandinavian and German/Austrian/Swiss kids having more than enough - see page 36 of this more recent report from the OECD:
www.oecd.org/els/family/43570328.pdf
Jay Doubleyou: explaining how your country's education system works
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