What makes a country better than another for your life?
We know that ranking countries on the basis of the information provided by their GNP is not satisfactory. There are so many other measures of well-being and quality of life. But what we are often offered as alternatives are only partly satisfactory as well, for they seem to be based on people's self-assessment of how happy and satisfied they are with their lives and conditions at that moment in that place. This may mirror cultural attitudes as well as real levels of well-being or, more often a bias in the choice of the "right" sort of population being modeled. So I'd like to propose an alternative test. People should be asked the following question: with the exclusion of your own country, rank countries of preference (here one provides the list) according to where you would like to live if you were (choose your ordering):
- a child from a very poor background- a very poor adult
- an adult without health insurance
- a completely uneducated adult
- a member of a different community
- a lay adult (not religious at all: agnostic, atheist, indifferent)
- a drug addicted
- a woman
- a homosexual
- a vegetarian/vegan
- a animal rights supporter
- a prostitute
- someone affected with AIDS
- someone affected by a chronic disease
- homeless
- a pacifist
- old and in need of constant care but without a family
- convicted (whether justly or unjustly) for murder
- convicted (whether justly or unjustly) of terrorist acts
- a prisoner
- a handicapped
- someone mentally ill
- a scientist
- a philosopher
My bet? People would like to live somewhere in the EU.
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