25 karma · joined October 1, 2020
Another link questioning the process behind the entire study itself: https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-an-ana...
FWIW, I like localism the most due to the psychological/cultural/scaling effects that it produces and hopefully, there's a minimally harmful way to get there without getting stuck in a nationalist rut.
it's understandable why people feel that way.
I think that if you as a parent are giving your child the freedom to go outside and explore however they want, as well as a minimum amount of advice, that's really where the advantage lies. Being told that the world is dangerous and constantly being smothered definitely causes issues but I don't think there's anything inherently valuable about socializing in a very specific way.
The amount of responses is skewed largely to 2-3 countries and the self-report guide is unreliable.
On top of that, by their own admission here: https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/economics/how-s-life_97892641...
their empirical data does not account for factors like wealth distribution, and a lot of the subjective indicators do not correlate strongly with the "objective" measures, with the exception of housing satisfaction.
Data and science doesn't make something objective. For something that claims to measure the quality of life of entire countries and compare them, I'd expect at least 70% of the world to be sampled in a thorough way.
Also, I don't think I've ever met anybody that genuinely believed the US was a third world country. They usually bring up its flaws in response to claims of "USA #1" or something along those lines which are slogans they grew up around their whole life. Now that they are looking into things, traveling, and experiencing more of life, they realize that that blanket statement holds no truth. The arm chair media consumption is definitely an issue but in the same way, I remember only reading good things about the US for almost the entirety of the 90s (consuming news from the BBC, Reuters, and local Japanese/Indian news orgs).