Best place to live
The Herald has a big spread on the OECD Better Life Index today — the graphics don’t show up in the online version, so I didn’t notice initially.
As long-time readers will remember from two years ago, the best thing about the OECD data is that their website lets you see what rankings result from giving different importance to different parts of their survey. For example, New Zealand does well overall, but does relatively poorly on income, so its ranking is quite sensitive to how important you think income is.
This year’s interactive website is here (the Herald, sadly, doesn’t link). Go play.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
I can’t come up with any combination that gets NZ higher than fifth in the OECD or ahead of Australia (maxing out jobs, health and work life balance gets them into consecutive positions). Might explain why NZers are moving to Australia.
More seriously, is there some double counting? Income includes household income, which seems to overlap with jobs, part of which is earnings.
11 years ago
Within a country there is a strong relationship between jobs and income, but not necessarily between countries.
In many European countries, for example, high unemployment and a relatively high median income co-exist because of taxes and transfers. In the US, unemployment is lower, but the minimum wage is low and the government provides relatively little. New Zealand is intermediate.
Australia was indeed doing well last year — better than in 2010 and quite likely better than it will in two years time. To get NZ to beat Australia (as happens in some indices) it helps to add in a measurement of official corruption or rule of law, where NZ and the Netherlands are still ranked as the best.
11 years ago