So some British think tank called the “Legatum Institute” has published an index of the best countries in which to live. Apparently they’ve been doing this every year for a while now, but it just now caught my eye.

Let me start by saying that I find this index pretty dubious. (N.B., there are a lot of bad international indexes out there. Don’t get me started on the American Heritage Index of Economic Freedom.) The Legatum Institute’s staff appears to be a mixture of warmed-over Thatcherites and recently-unemployed American conservatives. So it’s not surprising that the top 20 countries are dominated by western Europe and the Anglosphere, while the bottom ranks are all former colonies full of brown folk.

To make matters worse, they’re being shifty about their methodology. If you download the report (.pdf), you’ll find that it says it’s using 79 different variables, assigned to nine sub-indexes. But it does not say clearly what these variables are, nor where the information is coming from, nor whether they are weighted to create the sub-indexes. The sub-indexes are not weighted, which is another bad sign — they’re just taking the scores that they’ve generated and averaging them together.

Meanwhile, Iraq and Afghanistan are conspicuously missing. Okay, that could be from a lack of good data. On the other hand, they found enough data to go forward in Sudan, Yemen, and the Central African Republic. And having Mugabe’s Zimbabwe absolutely last makes me say “hm” — I can think of half a dozen places that should be in contention, from North Korea to the Congo — as does the very low rank given to Hugo Chavez’ Venezuela. (I’m no fan of Hugo’s. But Venezuela is the worst country in Latin America? Even after throwing out Guyana and a few other small countries that weren’t ranked, that’s a very large “hm” indeed.)

Having said that, this index is at least interesting. Continue reading →