Norway has been displaced from its lofty pedestal…
YAHOO NEWS – Iceland best place to live, Africa worst: UN
Iceland has overtaken Norway as the world’s most desirable country to live in, according to an annual U.N. table published on Tuesday that again puts AIDS-afflicted sub-Saharan African states at the bottom.Rich free-market countries dominate the top places, with Iceland, Norway, Australia, Canada and Ireland the first five but the United States slipping to 12th place from eighth last year in the U.N. Human Development Index.
I don’t know about you, but now that I know where the best place to live is I will be backing my bags, putting my home on the market, and moving my family to the paradise that is Iceland as quicky as possible. I don’t know how to thank the U.N. for this valuable information.
I suspect, though, that the good ol’ U.S. will begin moving back up the list and might even crack the top 10 when and if a liberal democrat is elected president. Of course, if that happens I might be willing to live anywhere but here. 
4 users commented in " U.N. names Iceland best place to live… "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackI think 12th of 175 is pretty darn good. I can’t credibly comment on life in Iceland, since I’ve never visited and it’s not exactly a nation that gets a lot of media exposure.
I can certainly say, that on balance the U.S. is a more desirable place for me to live than the UK. I miss the food, the architecture and heritage, and the ‘greenness’, but not the weather, the overcrowding, the cultural apathy, the Muslim extremists, nor the obscene cost of living.
Incidentally, there are quantitative metrics that factor into this rating, so spinning the U.S. ranking as being influenced primarily by our political conservatism or liberalism is unfair IMHO. The fact is, we rank relatively poorly in life expectancy, infant mortality, adult literacy, and several other important measures of development.
So I guess if a democratic president were able to address those problems, then certainly we might improve our ranking and crack the top 10.
The way they calculate the “Index” seriously skews the results towards smaller countries with longer-living populations and fewer children per family. That the U.S. is as high as 12th is actually pretty good considering that the US still has family sizes sufficient to replace the previous generations. What hurts the US is the low life expectancy of some minority groups and the larger family sizes.
This Index does not take into account trivial details like freedom, job opportunities or individual rights. It’s pretty much “How long do they live and how much money per capita do they have to spend?”
Call me a skeptic, but data seem to be moving, lately, in directions that favor liberal politicians. Perhaps the U.N. is above board on this particular index, but a 4 place drop in one year just before a U.S presidential election is just alittle suspicious to me. I expect to hear this index cited on the Democratic presidential stump…
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