I always hated indexes and rankings comparing countries.

I mean

Norway has a population of 5 million people.
And they're being compared to countries like the U.S. or China.
5,000,000
320,000,000
1,350,000,000

The population of Norway is almost equal to Phoenix, AZ.
Colorado and Alabama have more similar population sizes than Norway to the U.S.
Would you say those 2 states are extremely different in terms of industry, population makeup, ideologies?

Have you ever read a residential real estate appraisal?
Where they use the sales comparison approach?
They list a few properties and then manipulate the value of the differences to come to a general equal value in order to make it all equal?

To me these ranking indexes is comparing mansions to mobile homes to houses sold 3 years prior.

You need to make so many adjustments and ignore so many relevant factors it just becomes silly and meaningless.

The majority of the countries in the top ten have populations around 5 million people.
None of them have more than 40 or 50 million people.

Might as well compare education and find kindergartners in classes of 10 kids with teachers having direct hands on interaction have a happier and more functional education than the college basic 101 lecture class with 700 students and start saying Harvard education is slipping in the ranks.


And that doesn't even take into account what the people publishing these metrics love to do; constantly change how they measure and come up with their findings.
Just like how unemployment measuring is changed, or a change in seasonal adjustments, and we magically have 5% unemployment while 100 million people are out of the labor force.

So

What I make out of it is the only people that are going to find meaning in the prosperity index are people that don't want to put any thought into anything.

The Legatum Institute states that its index is unique in that it’s based on both income and well-being:

Prosperity is more than just the accumulation of material wealth, it is also the joy of everyday life and the prospect of an even better life in the future.