Posted on 10/05/2009 6:21:25 AM PDT by takbodan
You beat me to it.
Speaking as an Australian, I’m happy to see my country do so well on this list - but it has to be said, in terms of standards of living, there’s very little difference between any of the top 20 or so countries on the list. You’re talking first world democracies with decent human rights and the differences between them are fairly minor. Change the weighting you give to one minor criteria, and you’ll change the results within those nations - change another one, and you’ll do it again.
The overall message here is that reasonably free economies and reasonable adherence to human rights pay dividends. It’s the free world. That’s the point.
All true, but I will never forgive you folks for giving us Peter Allen and Olivia Newton John.
Suicide rates are a measure of “revealed preference” for human happiness. So I think they are superior to this UN index for telling us which countries are the best places to live. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate
To 15 - a job with the Icelandic Tourism Bureau is definitely not in your future.
Actually, I'll claim Peter Allen back happily. I Still Call Australia Home really speaks to me, and it's made a few absolutely wonderful TV commercials for Qantas (children's choirs have helped with that as well).
I can’t speak about Iceland or Australia, but Norway has a huge number and percentage of immigrants, particularly from Somalia, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and more recently, Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s been a growing population (I believe it’s up to about 10% of the population), and a growing concern for native Norwegians, who have been a fairly homogenous group for centuries. They are now confronted with the same economic and cultural issues that other countries are dealing with.
Guess my grandparents made a big mistake coming over from Norway back around 1900. /sarc/
What is an adhan?
Yes, Australia has a very high immigration rate as well - far higher than that of the US when compared to population (Australia takes in about 220,000 legal immigrants a year with a population of 22 million, the US with 14 times our population takes only about 5 times as many legal immigrants - including illegals, that rises to about 11 times).
but what a pool!!
Ofcourse a hamburger will set you back $30 but that wouldn’t stop the morons from the UN from coming to this conclusion.
Hey, let them continue to tout anywhere but here as a good place to live, maybe the immigrants will go elsewhere. Only I guess that won’t affect our biggest problem, the illegals flooding over our southern border. Dang.
He. I hadn’t read this far when I posted almost the same thing.
Not the Scandinavian or Netherlands, countries, Muslims there will be a majority before very many more decades. Rotterdam now has a Muslim mayor.
btt
SU
Barack Obama's favorite sound.
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