A few years back, when Norway had been ranked by the UN as the world's best place to live for the fifth year running, a funny thing happened. A bunch of Indian nationals landed in Norway in the middle of winter, ready to live the good life. However, they were ill prepared for the cold and the dark, and they knew no Norwegian. They had little savings, so they couldn't find a place to live for more than a few days, and without any skills of note, they could find no job. Desperate to avoid starvation and the freezing cold, they turned to the authorities who could do nothing more than send them back to India.
Clearly, Norway was not the best place in the world to live for the hopeful Indians. The UN had deceived them with their simplistic measure. The Indians were much better off in India than they were in Norway. However, this doesn't mean that Norway might be the best place to live for some people. There are plenty of good things to be said about Norway. It has a wonderful culture of trust. The standard of living is generally high. It's a great place for winter sports. For people with the right set of skills, a love for harsh wintery weather, and a reasonable fluency in Norwegian, Norway is as close to heaven as it's possible to get. But the number of people who fit this description is not very big. For the vast majority of us, Norway is not the best place to live.
The measures used by the UN were not very helpful for the Indians, and are just as useless for everybody else, because they don't apply to individuals. They don't even apply to individual Norwegians. There's a great number of miserable and frustrated Norwegians who are just as confused about the UN categorization as were the Indians, and the reason for this is apparent when we look into the measures used by the UN.
Until recently, the UN listed longevity, duration of schooling and gross average earnings as their only criteria for determining how good a place is to live in. The fact that Norwegian schools are notoriously slow at teaching kids stuff is therefore a plus, as is a natural tendency towards longevity and a high minimum wage. But moving to Norway does nothing to increase our longevity or extend our hours wasted at school, nor does it guarantee a job. We don't get any of the supposed benefits by moving to Norway. They apply only to those who live there for the entirety of their lives.
Once the UN added carbon footprint as one of their measures to determine how good a country is to live in, Norway fell several notches from the top, which goes to show how arbitrary the UN ranking is. It's useless nonsense, and only fools would use it to determine what place may be best for them.
Another useless index is the happiness indicator, where people are asked to rank their happiness from high to low. It's naturally skewed by culture. It's considered impolite in Scandinavian countries to rank oneself as unhappy, while the opposite is true in Latin countries. Misery is elevated to an art form in places like Portugal, so much so that there's an entire cultural scene dedicated to it, including their tradition of Fado songs. No matter how well things go for individuals in Portugal, they will hesitate to rank themselves much above misery, while things must be pretty desperate in Norway before people rank themselves miserable.
Complicating things even more is the fact that individual preferences vary. Some love winter sports, while others prefer a warm and dry climate. Law and order rank high for some while others enjoy a bit of chaos. Individual circumstances are also of importance. Wage earners have different preferences to social security recipients or rentiers. All of this must be considered before we can reasonably rank nations up against each other. However, this doesn't mean that we can't be somewhat scientific about it. While we all have personal preferences and circumstances, we all want to get as much out of our situation as we can. The list of things to look for is therefore the same for all, only the weighting varies.
As a rentier, I value low taxes and low cost of living. I also like long summers that are not too hot, and short winters with few cold days. I enjoy a bit of predictable chaos as opposed to strict law and order. I want to feel safe, but not so safe that it borders on oppression.
Using the above measures, Portugal comes out very well, so I'm happy to live in Porto. However, if I was a well qualified engineer with the intention to live form my labour, I would prefer Germany or Denmark, where salaries are the highest when measured against purchasing power. If I were to live off of my social security benefits, I would by necessity have had to stay in Norway so as not to disqualify, but I would have tried my utmost to get to Portugal with my benefits intact for the reasons stated above.
But for the vast majority of people, being close to family and friends trump all other concerns. Living abroad is out of the question. For them, there's no place like home, and no measure of any kind will make them think otherwise.
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