At 10/7/09 04:57 AM, Tancrisism wrote:
I find it ridiculous, as I have said in the politics forum, that Australia is number 2 given its insane amounts of government censorship. And Singapore is on it? Their human rights record is not that desirable...
As articles I've briefly browsed mention briefly, the criteria is generally the usual hard statistical stuff that makes calcualting the final list that little bit easier, if highly unreliable if we're talking about different attitudes and policies and so on. It's the usual HDI stuff basically: life expectancy, literacy, education and standards of living in short, and my experience with both Australia and Singapore explains why they place highly on the list. Singapore especially, since obviously it's a city state and it's famous for its laws that put a big emphasis on high standards of living (chewing gum is banned for instance, maybe a restricting law as far as some of us are concerned, but it's intended to make things cleaner, more comfortable etc. It certainly works on many levels, I think).
I do know what you mean though, it's a shame these studies don't take things like what you mentioned into account... but it's also quite hard to find a hard measurement of that when we move down to political opinion obviously. Example, lots of people support harsh censorship, but it's hard to use the different views as a hard stat. A touchier example would be that you could say having a less liberal legal system, like Singapore has, provides much more efficiency to the process, but of course, there are so many issues that explain the faults otherwise. You know what I mean anyway, I'm yammering on.
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As for where I'd go to live if I could choose any country on Earth... I honestly don't know really. In a perfect world where I wouldn't have the mindframe of the country I live in now, I'd go to somewhere like Bhutan, where modern development as far as we see it may not be great but the collectivist attitude builds you as a happier and more dedicated, productive person, in general. That's obviously a pipe dream: parts of western Europe and Scandinavia that score highly by HDI are more accessible. If I were more intelligent about the cultures of the nations in those areas, I'd jump for oppurtunities to get set up there. The same applies to Japan, aware of all the counter arguments I've read on the BBS and elsewhere. If I could find something where I could genuinely work hard, I'd go for it (that's my brief view on that, it's got holes but it's not worth talking about it here). Canada would be up there too.
It's not a political question for me, at least I don't think it is, I hope it isn't. When things are brought solely down to politics, that's when I start to hate this age. With all this information, we're really more concerned with judging each other's values based on the amount of "freedom" we have. Hey, it's even in this thread, joking or not joking, and I've seen it time and time again around the Net. Except in extreme cases, I find it extremely hard to measure "freedom" in a more objective way, and I think trying to do so is a dangerous exercise, in brief.
Right, I've thought about this too much now :)
