Thank you, Vince, for this reply. Of course I expected a good reply from you, since I put the Romani on the spot. I was well aware of it. You did not disappoint me, and I am glad you showed me your colors here.
Meanwhile, I will not back down from the happiest nations in the world, and while I like your expats inclusion in counting immigrants as being happiest in these nations, too, other nations also have expats in them, not ranking the happiest.
But there are more reasons I am enamored with the Scandinavian countries. First is how they have one layer of voter empowerment and not several. There is no President to swoop the game into an elitist direction, and there is no Senate to unnecessarily make things more complicated.
The other part is the Gini Index. Mr. Gini devised a system to calculate the distribution of wealth in a nation. You guessed it, the Scandinavian countries are doing really well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient
Personally, the map you can see on the wiki page is one of the most important maps I have ever seen. It doesn't mean it is perfect in execution, but it allows us to get a reasonably good impression on how well nations are organizing themselves around wealth. As such, it is an indication how socially aware the nations are and in how far they are controlling themselves.
Since you are enamored by China, the map shows that China is not doing all that well. The more orange or red a nation, the more the elite is climbing the stairs to their financial heaven.
What one can see on the maps as well is that a good number of Eastern European nations have rather good balances for wealth distribution, too, and I wonder if this is because they have the communist ideal still as a strong belief system inside of them (and in this case meaning a strong belief in equality) or if they have simply not been overrun by foreign investors playing the capitalist game much better because there isn't too much wealth to begin with yet in these nations (meaning, it can still be discovered financially and the outcomes may change dramatically).
Systems are very interesting 'animals' because if most or all people believe in 'We The People' then the political decisions will also shows that. China is one of the examples that if they believe the leadership needs to be good to all people and the leadership is tied to that ideal as well, then the entire population will be in focus more. Comparing this to the United States, where in the last thirty years the ideal of 'We The People' has been deteriorating and politicians have become more about 'me and my group' than about all people they should represent. I am expecting the same deterioration to occur in China, but this is all decades in the making and not happening from Monday on Tuesday.
Thank you for replying, Vince. I appreciate it much.
P.S. Gini indexes are not all exactly the same. One can get the overall picture from them rather well, but much depends on having data of good quality and what parameters are put in place. Here is another map, this time from the World Bank.
