Born lucky (or not)
 

I think we are in great need of a new thread.

This escaped (my) attention when it came out but via a few links has popped up this month; it's a ranking of countries in the world according to where best to be born:

http://www.economist.com/news/215664...3-lottery-life

UAE quite a bit higher than Britain! Of course if your country is not in the Top 12 then really you're not even worth talking to.

The Washington Post has turned it into a nice colour-coded map:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...rn-into-today/

Re: Born lucky (or not)
 

Pfft.

Re: Born lucky (or not)
 

Interesting. Being born at the right TIME is a key factor as well, I think, as Warren Buffet said.

Re: Born lucky (or not)
 

Seems legit to me. Although it has not got Ireland at number 1 so could be open to question.
Pakistan should be lower

Re: Born lucky (or not)
 

Serious Question.

What makes IReland so great in this sort of table?

Re: Born lucky (or not)
 

according to the article
The best countries to be born in are small, peaceful, homogenous, liberal democracies.
Which pretty much describes Ireland (when you exclude the north)

Low population density, high GDP per capita (economic crisis aside), high education rates, socialist tinges in our welfare state and the ability to make foreign women tremble at the knees.

Re: Born lucky (or not)
 

I would have thought Cork would have dragged Ireland into the red grading.

Re: Born lucky (or not)
 

I think they declared themselves a republic a while back, no-one outside of there cares :lol:

Re: Born lucky (or not)
 

Interesting.

Sounds like Wiltshire, so I'm happy.

Re: Born lucky (or not)
 

If I had the choice of being born an Egyptian or a Russian, I would choose Russian regardless of what that survey says.

Re: Born lucky (or not)
 

Fair point so just think how f***ing great the rest of it is to make up for that...

Re: Born lucky (or not)
 

Get born in Trowbridge and you've definitely won life's lottery...

If you'd said Somerset I'd have believed you.

Re: Born lucky (or not)
 

Australia at 2 :D, means the list is crap

Re: Born lucky (or not)
 

The UAE ranking probably only factors in native-born Emiratis? At least that'd be the statistics officially reported by the UAE authorities and in this light it'd be more accurate to compare the stats for babies born to the top 20% of UK wage earners.

Overall the list isn't surprising. It's long been know that smaller, homogenous European countries (read, overwhelmingly white from a single ethnic/cultural group) do the best job at providing a high quality of life for their people. It's when you get to the larger, more diverse (read, lots of immigrants, lots of poor minorities) countries that the overall QOL declines. I bet if you could break down the QOL by cultural groups within the larger countries you'd probably find that the QOL for the 'native born' population is more or less equal to Norway/Sweden/Netherlands etc (but not the UK as there's too many white trash running around).

Canada seems to be the only country that can genuinely be called diverse and still have a very high QOL. Australia has its migrants but I still wouldn't call it diverse, not like Canada. I like Canada. All the benefits of being in North America without being America.

Re: Born lucky (or not)
 

Thats a dodgy map, how is Kazakstan redder than India. India should have a special super duper red colour.