If you're not upset, you're probably at least confused. But trust the numbers, I arrived at them through the Baby Money Index (BMI).[1] The UN does th

There's a New Country Ranking and You're Not Going to Like it

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2024-12-02 20:30:07

If you're not upset, you're probably at least confused. But trust the numbers, I arrived at them through the Baby Money Index (BMI).[1]

The UN does this with the Human Development Index (HDI), which calculates the geometric mean of sub-indices in health, wealth, and education.

However, if you ignore all that math and only look at a single income indicator like GDP per capita, you get nearly the same ranking! HDI and GDP per capita correlate very strongly at 0.8.

If all the stuff you care about correlates with GDP per capita, you can just measure that alone to figure out how well a country is doing. Additional metrics add comparatively little information.

An important metric that appears to have no correlation with GDP is crime, but upon closer inspection, it may just be reporting bias. Poorer countries have less state capacity and, therefore, less ability to detect and report crime. If you look at crime victimization surveys, they do appear to show crime rates which largely correspond with income levels.

Sustainability is also valuable, but energy use per capita is just as strongly correlated with wealth. There are no examples of countries being low-energy and rich, and since GDP correlates with everything good, you'll have to devalue everything else to be a low-energy-use country.