What’s the best country to live in?
What’s the best country
in the world to live in?
Is it the one with the best food?
The longest life expectancy?
The best weather?
For the past 70 years, most governments
have relied heavily on a single number
to answer that question.
This number influences elections,
the stock market, and government policy.
But it was never intended
for its current purpose;
and some would argue that the world
is addicted to making it grow... forever.
This number is called
the Gross Domestic Product, or GDP,
and it was invented by the economist
Simon Kuznets in the 1930s,
to try and gauge the size of an economy
in a single, easy to understand number.
GDP is the total monetary value
of everything a country
produces and sells on the market.
To this day, GDP per capita,
which is just the total GDP divided by the
number of people living in that country,
is widely seen as a measure of well-being.
But GDP doesn’t actually say anything
direct about well-being,
because it doesn't take into account
what a country produces
or who has access to it.
A million dollars of weapons contributes
the exact same amount to a country’s GDP
as a million dollars of vaccines or food.
The value society derives from things
like public school or firefighters
isn’t counted in GDP at all, because those
services aren’t sold on the market.
And if a country has a lot of wealth,
but most of it is controlled
by relatively few people,
GDP per capita gives a distorted picture
of how much money a typical person has.
Despite all that, for a long time,
higher GDP did correlate closely
to a higher quality of life
for people in many countries.
From 1945 to 1970, as GDP doubled,
tripled or even quadrupled
in some western economies,
people’s wages often grew proportionally.
By the 1980s, this changed.
Countries continued to grow richer,
but wages stopped keeping pace
with GDP growth,
or in some cases, even declined,
and most of the benefits went to an
ever-smaller percentage of the population.
Still, the idea of capturing
a nation’s well-being in a single number
had powerful appeal.
In 1972, King Jigme Singye Wangchuk
of Bhutan
came up with the idea
of Gross National Happiness
as an alternative
to Gross Domestic Product.
Gross National Happiness is a metric
that factors in matters
like health, education,
strong communities, and living standards,
having citizens answer questions like,
“How happy do you think your family
members are at the moment?”
“What is your knowledge of names of plants
and wild animals in your area?”
and “What type of day was yesterday?”
The United Nations’ Human Development
Index is a more widely used metric;
it takes into account health
and education,
as well as income per capita
to estimate overall well-being.
Meanwhile, a metric called
the Sustainable Development Index
factors in both well-being and the
environmental burdens of economic growth,
again, boiling all this down
to a single number.
Though no country has been able to meet
the basic needs of its people while
also using resources
fully sustainably,
Costa Rica currently comes the closest.
Over the past few decades,
it’s managed to grow its economy
and improve living standards substantially
without drastically increasing
its emissions.
Other countries,
like Colombia and Jordan,
have made notable progress.
Costa Rica now has better well-being
outcomes like life expectancy
than some of the world’s
richest countries.
Ultimately, there are limits
to any approach that boils
the quality of life in a country
down to a single number.
Increasingly, experts favor a dashboard
approach that lays out all the factors
a single number obscures.
This approach makes even more sense given
that people have different priorities,
and the answer to which country
is best to live in
depends on who’s asking the question.
So what if that were you designing
your countries well-being metric?
What do you value,
and what would you measure?
