What’s the best country to live in?

650,021 views ・ 2022-06-30

TED-Ed


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