BF2S Forums World's best countries 2010 listed by Newsweek.

Winston_Churchill wrote:

...CanadARM?  We've been into space plenty of times.  Also, you guys cannot into space very soon so not very high ground there...

Cool, /care about the military.  We do our part.  We just bought 16 billion worth of fighter jets last week, is that good enough for you?  We rely on you just as much as you rely on us

Last edited by Macbeth (2010-08-17 15:44:35)

Last edited by m3thod (2010-08-17 15:44:19)

DonFck wrote:

jord wrote:

Id rather live somehwere warm tbh. Aus/new zealand please.

Yes please.

Kimmmmmmmmmmmm wrote:

that is cooooool

Ty wrote:

mcminty wrote:

DonFck wrote:

Yes please.

Australia. New Zealand is actually cold.

Depends where you are in NZ. Sure Dunedin/Otago is cold as is Christchurch/Canterbury. Wellington where I live is crap in winter but gets glorious in summer and Auckland/Northland is always pretty temperate.

I like NZ and I don't care what Newsweek says.

Vilham wrote:

Lol, when countries like Greece come before the UK in political environment you know something is wrong with the data they are using.

Macbeth wrote:

I like this newsweek article that was posted at the same time at this list.
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/08/12/how- … cline.html

So, yes, America has clearly suffered some decline, relative to other nations, and a loss of prestige. But even battered and beaten down, American power is more resilient than the naysayers give it credit for. And so is the international system that depends on American power as its central stabilizer. What the declinists tend to miss is the fact that there really are no rivals to the United States. Sure, Germany is an export powerhouse; but will it be a global power ever again? Even the Germans don’t want that—they have no military to speak of, and no one wants them to build one. Russia? Riiiight, if you think KGB-run companies and the organized murder of dissidents amount to a good model for governance. Japan? It’s long since resigned itself to becoming the Switzerland of Asia, wealthy and comfortable but resolutely neutral about just about everything (except maybe whaling). The European Union, meanwhile, has all it can do to keep its ever-fractious self together, given the market stresses on its troubled currency.
...
Looking again at the NEWSWEEK list, the “best” countries tend to be small, homogenous, and fairly harmless: Finland (No. 1), Switzerland, Sweden. All wonderful places—but they are nations that have almost no geopolitical role to speak of and never will. They’re just too tiny. Yet in the category of “large”—read significant—countries, the United States still finishes handily ahead of China in every major index, including economic dynamism, education, health, and “political environment.” What the figures don’t show at all is the unspoken tradeoff in the global system, a grand bargain that has persisted for a half century: to wit, Europeans and Asians (except for China) will agree to forgo serious military power and strategic dominance in exchange for acknowledging (again, tacitly) that the United States will play that role. This way they get to maintain their generous welfare states and their high McKinsey living standards.

Set aside for the moment the invasion of Iraq. America spends more on defense than the rest of the industrialized world combined, not because it is inherently militaristic, but because the United States is the enforcer of the international system. American military power overlays every region of the planet, restraining belligerents and preventing arms races from East Asia to Latin America. That, in turn, enables globalization to proceed, even in these troubled times for the world economy.

You're welcome Europe.

DonFck wrote:

Newsweek has listed the worlds best countries. I can't really agree. But a cool thing nevertheless.

http://www.newsweek.com/feature/2010/th … tries.html

http://i33.tinypic.com/mikjev.png

This is not a "Yeah, that's right America" post. This is more of an "in your face, Sweden" post.

But yeah. In your face Sweden. And Switzerland. And Oz too, you wondrous land of hot chicks and the barrier reef. Finland, for some really odd reason has prevailed.

Interesting read:

Why cold, dark, small, and depressive nations top the rankings. wrote:

I used to eat at a Scandinavian cafeteria in San Francisco that called itself a “smorgasbord” and advertised its reindeer meatballs over pasta as superior to the Italian meatballs at the U.S. Cafe next door. This place was just outside Chinatown. It also had Swedish meatballs, but if there was a difference only a Finn could tell for sure. After the Mormon Tabernacle Choir performing Gypsy music from Slovenia under the direction of a Japanese conductor in Salt Lake City, this is my second-favorite example of the great American smorgasbord.
The word may have originated in Sweden, but looking over the metrics for “best -countries”—where Sweden is No. 3 and Finland No. 1, Norway No. 6 and Denmark No. 10—I find it hard to imagine just how much variety that Northern European buffet holds. Why is it that the Nordics always dominate such lists, anyhow? Since it’s dark and cold outside for most of the year, the smorgasbord itself must be an attempt to offset tedium, angst, and monochromatism. Even so, there couldn’t be that many kinds of pickled herring, smoked fish, dark rye bread, and mustards on the smorgasbord, be-cause we know from the 1987 movie Babette’s Feast that a French woman on the run in Scandinavia after the Paris Commune turned the austere locals into insane bons vivants by means of spices. Also, as Ingmar Bergman’s movies and Stieg Larsson’s novels show, Scandinavian angst is nothing to laugh about. Pass the vodka, the incest, and the noose.

Still, metrics are metrics, and art is subjective, so let’s try another tack. Intuitively, one would think that people who are warm most of the year would be better off than people who are not. Yet Finland is in the No. 1 spot, and tropical Burkina Faso dead last at 100. The link between freezing and a high ranking becomes more explicable when the following dots are connected: a heated classroom is better than being outside chopping trees, hence education is important; moving briskly is good preventive medicine, thus health is robust; quality of life improves immensely when one must get as close to one’s beloved as possible to fend off the chill; the political environment is likewise better when governance is kept simple and equitable because it’s too cold to fight in the streets; and finally, economic dynamism is bound to be high among peoples who have learned to combat frostbite with a maximum of movement and the least expense of calories.

A large portion of Finland’s well-being is also the result of its historical reputation for fierceness and diplomacy; it has had to fight and appease both the Russians and the Germans. Switzerland, at No. 2 on the “best countries” list, shares a similar history: squeezed between warring powers, it looked most appetizing to its French, German, Austrian, and Italian neighbors. The Swiss Alps are very good for health, Swiss banks are (or were, until recently) very good for hiding ill-gotten gains, and its so-called neutrality made it an excellent place for enemy combatants to do business and spy on each other. All these reasons, combined with a reputation for martial valor, enabled the Swiss to thrive and plan; the Alps are honeycombed by tunnels stocked with food that would enable every Swiss citizen to survive a nuclear war. Switzerland is a Swiss-cheese country hiding an underground smorgasbord.
The world’s “best countries” seem to have this in common: they avoid war, they live in the dark, and they maintain a steady state of depressive and productive activity. No wonder, then, that we in the United States rank a pathetic No. 11. We are the only country in the world that has written “the pursuit of happiness” into its founding document, thus guaranteeing that we’ll never be satisfied. We are a geographically and socially diverse nation doomed by law and custom to optimism. We are not too healthy, are quite belligerent, and we borrow too much without thinking much about how we’ll pay it back. To achieve better metrics we’d need to tolerate a lot more (smorgas) boredom.

Sauce