Why Iceland Might Be The Greatest Country On Earth

And What Canada Should Learn From This…

When previously discussing ‘American Exceptionalism’ and false consciousness, I reviewed data which covered the general quality of life for a number of other countries in comparison with America, which demonstrated that the people of various other countries are more employed, more economically free, healthier, happier, etc. I decided to expand upon this meta-analysis by adding more data sets and countries, and eventually concluded that Iceland might just be the greatest country on Earth.

The data sets which have been included here measure economic freedom, employment rates, household disposable income, social mobility (i.e. how meritocratic a country truly is), social inequality (note: the higher the score, the more social inequality there is), healthcare access and quality (including whether or not the country’s healthcare system is public or private), educational scores, life expectancy, and happiness. The data sets which have been added here and were not present within my previous analysis are that which covers social mobility, social inequality, and life expectancy. For all data sets, I used the most recently available data, from credible sources such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), peer-reviewed journals, etc.

After collecting all of this data, I gave each country a score of 1–9 or 1–10 (depending on whether or not two countries got the same score) for each data set, added up the numbers, and created a relative ranking based on that score. Iceland, as the title of this article would have you expect, scored the greatest.

Of course, this is a relative ranking insofar as only ten nations were included. In the future, I will likely expand upon this analysis by adding all OECD countries and more data sets which are relevant to measuring quality of life. For now, at least, Iceland looks like it is the greatest country in the world in terms of quality of life.

General Conclusions

Drawing from the data generally, however, there is a correlation between how strong a country’s social safety net is and the quality of life of its people. Strong social safety nets, instead of reducing economic freedom as laissez faire advocates would like you to believe, appear to have a minimal effect on economic freedom, and in a number of cases economic freedom is actually greater. Strong social safety nets likewise do not make the population ‘lazy’ and ‘unwilling to work,’ as the data shows; in fact, the United States — the country on this list with the weakest social safety net — has the lowest rates of employment. Furthermore, strong social safety nets greatly reduce social inequality, whilst increasing social mobility; that is, true equality of opportunity and meritocracy actually exist where there is a strong social safety net. Finally, strong social safety nets are also correlated with better access to and quality of healthcare, a longer life expectancy, and a greater amount of perceived happiness.

What Canada Should Learn

Objectively and veritably, we as a country should be taking less notes from our Southern neighbor, and should start taking more notes from countries like Iceland, Norway, and Finland, with their social democratic policies. Although it is not covered in the data sets above, these Nordic countries have set it place and promoted many progressive policies which a number of political parties here in Canada (i.e. the NDP, the Green Party, and the Communist Party) have been spent years advocating for. As a country, we should be strongly advocating for free education (including at the university level), greater taxes on the ultra-wealthy, greater unionization rates, more nationalized industry, etc. In 2023, when we are again re-evaluating who we want to be as a country, I hope that we can all keep the data covered here in mind.

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